Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  One of the gauges had a Wilson football logo on it and a needle about one-eighth the length of the long, crooked needle the non-logo gauge had. At halftime on January 18, Anderson, Mike Kensil, and the game crew had two NFL officials, Clete Blakeman and Dyrol Prioleau, measuring the 12 Patriots balls. The ones Blakeman measured were consistently lower than Prioleau’s—until they measured four Colts balls, then Blakeman’s numbers were higher. Why? How is that possible if you’re doing that right? Well, because they must have switched gauges. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Anything to prove the narrative.

  Meaning anything. Even if it means saying that referee Wells spent a whole paragraph telling us that Anderson, a paragon of virtue and intelligence, didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Anderson told Wells that when he tested the balls pregame, he used the non-logo gauge, the one with the long, bent needle, the one that gave higher readings. So if true, that means the Patriots’ game balls all fell to within the acceptable range of the Ideal Gas Law. Which meant all of this was a colossally pointless waste of time.

  So to solve that dilemma, Wells conveniently just said Anderson remembered it wrong. Boom. Problem solved. Of course, he buried that little treasure in a footnote on a different page that you needed a pirate map to find. But let’s hear it for fairness and independence.

  Seriously, within hours of this thing dropping, I believed that the case the report laid out was so weak that it vindicated not only Brady but also everyone who had been Defending the Wall. First, because it completely exonerated the Patriots. And second, because it seemed like such a transparent example of trying to reach a foregone conclusion that everyone would see through it in time. And believe me, we caught hell for it.

  I was on Comcast Sports that night with Mike Felger, Ron Borges, and a panel of Deflategate Flat Earthers who were all convinced that Wells had proved his case. I told them about Exponent and said that Ted Wells had shot an arrow and paid them to draw a bull’s-eye around it. It fell on deaf ears. I brought up the Ideal Gas Law and got laughed at. I mentioned the myth about D’Qwell Jackson and the interception and got talked over.

  Their whole case stood on the texts between The Deflator and Dorito Dink and connecting dots that, to me, felt unconnectable. That crew and most of the hosts on the two sports talk stations in town were convinced that Wells had proven guilt and this was going to be bad for the Patriots and for Brady.

  While I was right about the fraud the NFL was perpetrating, they were right about the punishment. It was unprecedented: a nuclear triad of punitive measures, hitting the team from land, sea, and air. The Patriots would be whacked both their first-round draft pick in 2016 and a fourth rounder the following year. They were fined a million bucks. And Brady was suspended for the first four games of the 2015 season. Dean Wormer had dropped the big one.

  The most shocking part of it were the draft picks, given that Roger Goodell had just paid an attorney $5 million to tell him they didn’t do anything wrong. Goodell’s assistant, who, technically speaking, handed out the punishment, said it was for not cooperating with the investigation, despite the fact the report said in plain English that the team did. The hang-up was over the fact that Wells’s team wanted to talk to Dorito Dink (or The Deflator; even I’m confused) for a fifth time and the Patriots finally said enough was enough. And that cost them a future great player. A Logan Mankins. A Vince Wilfork. A potential Hall of Fame career that would never happen now because four interviews about air pressure weren’t enough.

  I cared less about the million dollars, but that’s usually how I feel about other people’s money. I just for the life of me couldn’t imagine what Robert Kraft was supposed to write on the memo line on that check where it says “For: .”

  Kraft was furious. On Friday, he gave an angry interview to Sports Illustrated’s Peter King demanding justice that fired up the Defenders of the Wall like nothing else had. By the beginning of the week, he showed up at an NFL owners’ spring meeting saying he was ending the fight for the good of “the partnership of all 32 teams.” Hoping to buy Tom Brady some goodwill in the appeals process, Kraft capitulated. He Kraft-pitulated. And he would soon learn that when dealing with a commissioner who works for those 31 “partners” who resent everything you’ve ever accomplished, no good deed goes unpunished.

  But the immediate matter at hand was that the defending Super Bowl MVP, and only the second quarterback to win four rings, was going to be out for a month. It turns out the NFL has an appeal process, but there was zero hope in that as Goodell gave himself the authority to hear the appeal. The NFL was a hillbilly town where the magistrate, the clerk, and the judge are all the same guy who just arrested you. It was a sham.

  While all this was going on, voices from around the country started to speak up. Physicists who shot down Exponent’s findings on the data. Researchers who talked about the dangers of science-for-hire firms like them. Robert Blecker, an NYU law professor who hates the Patriots and admits he never wants to see them win another game, went on 60 Minutes to talk about how the NFL’s appeal process is not only unjust, but also violates labor laws. One heroic eighth grader did his science fair project proving the balls were deflated by the cold. There were “Free Brady” rallies being held. And still the Truthers, who opposed Goodell on Ray Rice and said he’d lied about concussions and a dozen other issues, chose to believe him on this one.

  The biggest hang-up for most people was the issue of Brady’s phone. (I realize that was a pun but, but moving on . . . ) He refused to hand it over to the investigation—an investigation that from the beginning was leaking out every bit of damning, mischaracterized info they could get into the hands of their state-run media. Americans in the year 2015 argued the case that a union employee should hand his private phone over to his boss’s boss. And if he didn’t, it could only mean he was guilty—though it was hard to hear them over the sound of the Framers of the Constitution clawing at the tops of their caskets.

  That shoe dropped with a sonic boom when ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith reported that on the day Brady met with the investigators, he “destroyed” his phone. The whole country did the collective “Whoaaaaaa!” of a Maury Povich audience when the paternity test comes back positive. This had to be it. That information that had been leaked to Smith included the carefully chosen buzzword “destroyed,” like Brady was Aaron Hernandez handing the shattered pieces of his phone over to police detectives.

  Frankly, when I do what Brady did that day, I and the phone retailers refer to it as “an upgrade.” It was a complete red herring because he had no intention of sharing his private communication device with anyone because they weren’t entitled. Now, I would’ve preferred that he just kept his old phone in his pocket and said, “It’s right here and you’ll never see it,” instead of stupidly handing the other side this massive PR victory. But he did. And one of the great sting operations of our lifetime had new life.

  Eventually, Brady got in front of Goodell for the kangaroo court at his office in Manhattan. He hired one of the most highly respected attorneys in the country, Jeffrey Kessler. He insisted on testifying under oath, the only one in the entire matter to do so. He might as well have hired Attorney Vinny Gambini and given all his testimony in the language of Minions for all the good it did. The commissioner decided to uphold the decision that had come from his office, to the shock of no one. He even took the mind-blowing step of comparing what Brady did to steroid use.

  A disappointed Robert Kraft apologized to the fans of his team, saying, “I was wrong to put my faith in the league.” To which an entire region said, “Ya think?”

  Eventually, the team did craft a response. “The Wells Report in Context” was their attempt to refute everything that the original report got wrong, lied about, and covered up, and to explain a few things. It was successful to the extent it gave the faithful some ammo, but it’s tough to say that it changed a lot of hearts and minds.

  The most astonishing read in the document is the emails the Patriots includ
ed between themselves and the NFL’s legal team, especially Jeff Pash, begging him to set the record straight publicly on what the actual football psi numbers were. They reminded Pash that he works for all 32 teams equally—and those numbers Mortensen had out there were wrong and doing them harm—only to be told the NFL doesn’t respond to every false report put out there. Of course, in the past, the league has scrambled helicopters and dropped commandos into places that have reported things damaging to “The Shield” on numerous occasions. But in this instance, it told the Patriots they could go piss up a rope.

  A few other details were worth noting. The Wells Report had characterized Walt Anderson as in a state of panic that the game balls were out of his sight for 25 minutes, something that had never happened in his amazing and legendary career. The “Report in Context” mentioned the security cameras catching “The Deflator” casually walking to the field at the end of the Seattle–Green Bay game, past everyone in the officials’ locker room, NFL security, and anyone who might have cared about a clandestine operative slipping past them with a bag of balls as part of a nefarious plot, which makes no sense in light of the fact the officials had been tipped off to be on the lookout for the Patriots’ monkeyshines with regard to the footballs.

  As far as the infamous “Deflator” text that is basically the last refuge of the scoundrels on this whole mess, “The Wells Report in Context” has taken a tsunami of criticism for claiming Artoo and Threepio were referring to weight loss. In response to that response, Defenders of the Wall presented me with easily a half dozen examples of inflate and deflate used in that very context, from Muscle & Fitness magazine to Jamie Foxx in the football movie Any Given Sunday to, oh right, an NFL Network show.

  Regardless, if you think all that is BS, fine. But I issued a challenge for just one of the Deflategate Truthers to answer me how the term “deflate” referred to the illegal leakage of air out of balls and not weight loss in the text between McNally and Jastremski in that Green Bay game where they told the wacky anecdote about Aaron Rodgers and overinflated footballs. According to the Wells Report, McNally was sitting at home watching the game when the sideline cameras showed Jastremski. “Deflate and give me that jacket,” McNally texted. I am still waiting for an answer.

  I suppose that because both sides recognized Goodell’s “appeal” process gave him power that doesn’t exist anywhere besides maybe the queen in a bee colony, they each scrambled to federal court. The NFL’s lawyers were able to touch the clerk’s desk and yell, “FIRST!” They actually appealed their own boss’s decision before a federal judge. Unfortunately, that judge happened to be Justice Richard Berman, a jurist who apparently holds some crazy notions about fairness, worker’s rights, and labor statutes. Without even getting into the idea that temperature has an effect on air volume and sometimes guys need to take their Dorito Dinks out in the bathroom, he overturned Brady’s suspension in early September. The NFL appealed, but that case wouldn’t be heard until after the season.

  Brady was exonerated—at least for now. He would play the entire 2015 season. It was a huge win, not just for the season, but for the legions of Patriots fans who had stuck by the team and the quarterback through all of it. And as an ancillary benefit, the whole process eliminated that growing Yankeefanification I was so worried about before. We were more emotionally invested than at any time before. I could never know for sure what happened to that maniac who shushed my brother and me for being too loud during Tedy Bruschi’s return, but I like to think she was wearing a “Defend the Wall” shirt and flipping Roger Goodell’s house in Maine the old State Bird of Massachusetts as she drove by.

  33

  Not Bitter

  For the media’s part, they didn’t let a little thing like a federal judge ruling that Brady had been suspended unfairly knock them off their narrative that the Patriots were the cheatingest cheaters who ever cheated. Please sit down before you read this shocking news, but the leading outlet beating that drum was ESPN.

  In a long ESPN The Magazine piece, timed to kill the buzz just two days after Brady’s court victory, Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham teamed up for a crazy, multi-thousand-word “investigation” so full of crackpot conspiracy theories it probably belonged on the Dark Web. Among them, the Patriots bug the visitors’ locker room at Gillette, confirmed by Tony Dungy admitting he held meetings in the hallway. The Colts also took out their own trash because they were convinced Bill Belichick had interns fishing through the trash for information. There was something in there about the Seahawks practicing in Arizona and scouring the hills for telephoto lenses. As opposed to, I don’t know, trying to clean up their own goal line pass plays, which everyone had seen already.

  But my personal favorite theory in that hatchet piece was the very Scooby-Doo theory that the CBS Scene restaurant, which sits just a short distance from Gillette Stadium across from the iconic lighthouse, angled its video billboard so the Patriots’ sideline could see it, giving them an advantage on replay challenges. There are two problems with that idea. One, the billboard can’t be seen from the New England sideline, which a simple trip to the place could confirm. And two, how would a video screen a par-5 golf hole away be better than the hi-def screens right in front of the coaches in the booth? But logic doesn’t help cure Deflategate Derangement Syndrome.

  There was no letup from the fans of New England, to be sure. There’s no way to quantify how much that relationship between a team and their fan base is a symbiotic one, with the players feeding off the emotions of the people whose $200 tickets and $9.50 beers keep the lights on in the stadium. Maybe in an honest moment, pro athletes would admit it’s pretty negligible. All we know for sure is Pats fans and players came out of the gate in 2015 as anything but complacent.

  Unofficially, the Tom Brady Vindication Tour 2015 was on. And it was glorious for all of the early dates. The Thursday night opener, the team’s first Banner Drop Night in 10 years, was electric, made all the better with the news that Roger Goodell was skipping it. His logic was that he had just been there for the AFC championship game, so why go back? It was the first time as commissioner he’d skipped the season’s “Kickoff Game” and he wasn’t missed. The crowd dusted off an old Fenway Park taunt written originally for Roger Clemens after he left the Red Sox, “Where is Ro-o-o-ger?!?” Because Massachusetts is all about recycling.

  The opener was against the Pittsburgh Steelers, and if there was any doubt that the Super Bowl XLIX win or Tom Brady’s temporary win in federal court would stop the “Cheatriots” talk, we were being pathetically naïve.

  At some point in the Patriots’ convincing win, the Steelers’ sideline communication with players’ helmets went haywire. Instead of hearing the coaches, players were hearing the Patriots’ radio feed instead, with Scott Zolak screaming about unicorns and show ponies or whatever. After the game, coach Mike Tomlin was livid, making it painfully clear he considered this par for the course when you play at Gillette and ignoring the fact the NFL itself handles matters like the communication, as John Harbaugh conveniently forgot the league handles the scoreboard three seasons earlier.

  And just to double down on the rules ignorance, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, a 12-year NFL veteran who had probably been playing football since before the first iPod, complained that the Patriots’ defensive linemen were shifting before he snapped the ball—something that has been legal since before the first stereo. Deflategate Derangement Syndrome was becoming so prevalent, it was close to qualifying for its own ribbon.

  Week 2 was special, because after Rex Ryan had been fired by the Jets, he was immediately hired by the Buffalo Bills. Back in December, after the Patriots had struggled through yet another tough game against Ryan’s schemes, I wrote a piece saying I wanted him gone and out of the AFC East for good. By the time the Bills announced him as their new savior, I had realized I needed him. The bloviating. The fake confidence. The bulletin board material. The foot appreciation. Even the clever game plans that made every game again
st him a challenge. He completed me.

  The problem was, these Bills were not his team. Not yet. The Patriots picked them apart for a 40–32 win. Malcolm Butler was proving he was not just a one-hit wonder, replacing Revis as the full-time starter, competing at a high level, and intercepting the Bills’ Tyrod Taylor in a game where a ton of Buffalo garbage time points made it look closer than it was.

  One of the truly satisfying dynamics of the early part of that 2015 season was watching the NFL’s response to what Julian Edelman called “all them formations.” Yes, the Ravens succeeded in getting the schemes they weren’t prepared for declared illegal. They then proceeded to run almost an identical look to the one John Harbaugh called “deception.” And got away with it. It was hypocrisy of the highest order. And like all hypocrisy, it made your heart glow.

  The whole first part of the 2015 season was not far behind. The Patriots took a 10–0 record into Denver, meaning that not only hadn’t they lost in the 11½ games since Tom Brady was forced under duress to play with footballs he couldn’t illegally tamper with, but they also had only lost one meaningful game in the last calendar year, that one at Green Bay 364 days earlier.

  Even though they were 8–2, this was not the Broncos team that had won the conference championship two years earlier. The defense was every bit as elite, if not better. But Peyton Manning was a shell of himself. Statistically one of the worst quarterbacks in the league, he looked like a living, breathing, cautionary tale about knowing when to walk away from the game.

  For the first time in his career, Manning was losing playing time. The Broncos had benched him in favor of Brock Osweiler, whom they’d drafted in the second round years earlier, much in the way the Pats had taken Jimmy Garoppolo. The benching was tough on Manning, I’m sure, but it did give him more free time to work on getting a scandal of his own swept under the rug.