Before we provide you with some more information on the Deflategate investigation, we should note one thing — the NFL is not a court of law. If the league followed the same guidelines and regulations as our legal system, the New England Patriots would probably be off the hook already.
On Thursday, NFL vice president of officiating Dean Blandino held a press conference with the media during which he updated reporters on the Deflategate investigation. One of the more interesting revelations Blandino made is that the NFL does not log the PSI (pounds per square inch) of each football before games.
As Jeff Howe of the Boston Globe noted, Blandino said the exact PSI of the AFC Championship game balls was not logged before the game or at halftime. Instead, head referee Walt Anderson simply approved of disapproved each ball.
This could be the sole reason Bill Belichick and Patriots owner Robert Kraft seem so confident that their team will be exonerated. Is Anderson’s word all the NFL needs to sanction the Pats?
One of the first reports about Deflategate indicated that New England’s game balls were approved before the game and found to be two PSI under-inflated at halftime. A more recent report claims the balls were only one PSI under.
Aren’t details important here? If Anderson didn’t log any of the numbers, how sure can he be? Will he remember the exact PSI of each ball? I highly doubt it.
At the very least, the process of checking footballs is going to be revised next season (and for the Super Bowl). The PSI of each ball will be logged before every game and probably at halftime going forward. But if Anderson didn’t do that before the AFC Championship Game, it makes it harder to believe that the NFL was running a sting operation. Either that, or it was was a horribly planned sting operation.
The more we learn, the more it becomes obvious that this piece of evidence could be the most important thing the NFL has.
