PRO FOOTBALL

Patriots, With Tom Brady’s Knowledge, Most Likely Deflated Footballs, Report Says

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The report said Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was probably aware of the deflated footballs he used against the Indianapolis Colts in the A.F.C. championship game.Damon Winter/The New York Times 
He called himself the deflator. A longtime locker-room attendant for the New England Patriots, Jim McNally, was responsible for controlling the air pressure in the footballs that quarterback Tom Bradywould use on the field.
Another Patriots employee, an equipment assistant named John Jastremski, was in direct communication with Brady and provided McNally with memorabilia, including shoes and autographed footballs.
Along with Brady, the passer regarded among the best ever, the two low-rung employees, co-conspirators and friends — who joked about the covert work they were doing — were in the Patriots’ equipment room on Jan. 10, just before a playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens. McNally received two footballs signed by Brady. He had Brady autograph a game-used jersey.
Brady, soon to be a Super Bowl champion for the fourth time, then led the Patriots to a come-from-behind victory, completing 33 of 50 passes for 367 yards. It put the Patriots in the A.F.C. championship game against the Indianapolis Colts the following weekend.

DOCUMENT 

Investigative Report on A.F.C. Championship Game Footballs 

The investigative report into accusations that the New England Patriots improperly deflated game balls in last January’s A.F.C. championship game. 
 OPEN DOCUMENT 
That was where the clandestine operation of the two employees unraveled into a scandal that would threaten Brady’s sterling reputation and further tarnish the reputation of the Patriots, an organization that has taken suspicious paths to success.
On Wednesday, the N.F.L. released its report on its investigation into New England’s surreptitious practice of deflating game-day footballs. Using detailed accounts and circumstantial evidence, it implicated Brady as part of the operation, saying he surely knew that the two employees, McNally, 48, and Jastremski, then 35, were purposely deflating footballs to a level beyond the permissible threshold for Brady’s benefit.
“There is less direct evidence linking Brady to tampering activities than either McNally or Jastremski,” the report said. “We nevertheless believe, based on the totality of the evidence, that it is more probable than not that Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski.”
The N.F.L. report absolved other top Patriots officials, including Coach Bill Belichick, the owner Robert K. Kraft and the equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld, saying that there was “no wrongdoing or knowledge of wrongdoing” on their part.
The N.F.L. said it would consider disciplinary action and changes to game-day protocol as a result of the findings.
It was not the first time that that the Patriots, who won the Super Bowl, 28-24, against the Seattle Seahawks in February, had been found to break rules to gain an advantage. In 2007, the league fined the Patriots and Belichick and ordered the team to forfeit a first-round draft pick after a Patriots staff member was discovered videotaping signals by Jets coaches during a game.
Belichick was fined $500,000, and the team was ordered to pay $250,000. Belichick accepted full responsibility for the incident, which Goodell called “a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field.”
For this case, the outside investigators, hired by the N.F.L., left some critical questions outstanding. They were unable to determine when the operation to release air from footballs had begun, who had come up with the idea, how often it had occurred or “the full scope of communications related to those efforts,” the report said.
But investigators implied that Brady had lied when he denied any knowledge of the operation or of McNally’s name and role. They found that Brady had spoken to Jastremski on the phone for more than 13 minutes starting shortly before 7:30 a.m. the morning after the A.F.C. championship game, their first phone conversation in six months. At Brady’s behest, for the first time that Jastremski could recall, they met in the quarterbacks’ meeting room later in the morning.
Brady told investigators that he wanted to discuss how the Super Bowl balls would be prepared and that the subject of the previous day’s underinflated balls and the growing scandal “may have come up.”
The report said that Brady had been interviewed about his role but declined to provide documents or electronic information, such as text messages.
“To say we are disappointed in its findings, which do not include any incontrovertible or hard evidence of deliberate deflation of footballs at the A.F.C. championship game, would be a gross understatement,” Kraft said in a statement.
The report, 139 pages plus an appendix detailing scientific findings about the physics of ball deflation, was titled “Investigative Report Concerning Footballs Used During the A.F.C. Championship Game on January 18, 2015.” It was written by Theodore V. Wells Jr., Brad S. Karp and Lorin L. Reisner of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a New York law firm.
The report uses the nebulous phrase “more probable than not” several times in making its conclusions, per the league’s policy on integrity of the game and enforcement of competitive rules.
Under the policy, the “standard of proof required to find that a violation of the competitive rules has occurred” is a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning that “as a whole, the fact sought to be proved is more probable than not,” the report’s first footnote read.
At the report’s heart is a tale of two wisecracking Patriots employees, McNally and Jastremski, finding themselves in the middle of a covert operation, all aimed to please the star quarterback.
McNally called himself “the deflator” in a text message to Jastremski as far back as last May, and the two mocked Brady’s early-season struggles and his complaints about overinflated balls.
Part of Jastremski’s job was to prepare the game balls to Brady’s liking, using a set of allowable tricks — dirt and brushes to remove the slippery sheen, a leather conditioner to soften the touch, and a range of allowed air pressures to ensure a comfortable grip. Brady told investigators that he considered Jastremski a friend and that the two had seen each other daily during the season.
“I have a big needle for u this week,” Jastremski wrote to McNally in a text message in October.
“Better be surrounded by cash and newkicks,” McNally responded, referring to shoes, “or its a rugby sunday.”
The report also detailed the day that the program fully unraveled in January. In the hours before January’s A.F.C. championship game in Foxborough, Mass., in the byzantine catacombs beneath Gillette Stadium, McNally took 12 game balls to the locker room used by on-field officials.
Until 2006, all balls were provided by the home team. But quarterbacks, led by Brady and Peyton Manning, successfully lobbied to change the rule, which allows each to supply balls for when his offense is on the field.
Brady recovered the game ball after throwing a touchdown pass early in the third quarter and set it on the Patriots' bench. Damon Winter/The New York Times 
The head referee for the game between the Patriots and the Colts, Walt Anderson, used a gauge to test the air pressure of each ball. The balls are made of a urethane bladder inside a pebbled leather casing. N.F.L. rules dictate that they be properly inflated during a game, falling into the window of 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch.
McNally told Anderson that Brady liked the balls to be at the low end of the scale. (Brady later confirmed this, to reporters, saying that he liked squishier footballs to help him get a better grip.) Ten of the balls were approved. Two others were underinflated. Anderson instructed another official to pump them up until they reached the 12.5-p.s.i. threshold.
A second bag of balls was provided by the Colts. Those, too, were tested. Most were inflated to about 13.0. All were approved.
A short time later, Anderson looked around the locker room. The two bags of balls were gone. It was the first time in his 19-year career as an N.F.L. official that Anderson could not find the footballs before a game, he told investigators.
McNally had taken them out of the locker room without anyone’s noticing. He turned left, then left again, walking through a tunnel toward the playing field. Just before he got there, he entered a bathroom to the left.
He locked the door and was inside for 1 minute 40 seconds, surveillance footage later showed. He left the bathroom and took them to the field. And when 11 balls were tested with two gauges at halftime, after the Colts had raised suspicions following a second-quarter interception of a Brady pass, they were all below 12.5 p.s.i. Most were substantially lower. One was at 10.5.
The game was played in the rain, and deflated balls would have been easier to grip in the wet weather.
The scandal had begun.
The Patriots won the A.F.C. championship, 45-7, but the victory was quickly overshadowed by intrigue and controversy, as team leaders — Brady, Belichick and Kraft, mostly — took turns denying any wrongdoing.
Debates raged over whether the balls had naturally deflated because of the cool game-day conditions, or whether it was another detestable form of cheating by the Patriots.
The N.F.L., trying to keep the ball controversy from overwhelming anticipation for the Super Bowl, promised a thorough investigation. The Patriots beat the Seahawks for their fourth championship since 2001, all under Belichick and with Brady at quarterback.
The investigation could not determine how many years, if any, the intentional deflating of footballs had gone on. It revealed a text-message correspondence between McNally and Jastremski from May 9, 2014, in which McNally, after asking Jastremski if he was working, wrote: “jimmy needs some kicks....lets make a deal.....come on help the deflator.”
Brady struggled early in the season. On the sideline during an Oct. 16 home game against the Jets, Jastremski said, Brady complained to him about the inflation of the balls.
“Tom is acting crazy about balls,” Jastremski texted to an unidentified recipient at halftime.
Jastremski told Brady that McNally was the locker-room attendant for the officials, and Brady “said something like, ‘isn’t he in there to make sure the balls are staying where they should be?’ ” the report said.
The Patriots won, 27-25, and Brady was a rather ordinary 20 of 37 passing for 261 yards, though he threw for three touchdowns and no interceptions.
“Talked to him last night,” Jastremski wrote to McNally the morning after the game. “He actually brought you up and said you must have a lot of stress trying to get them done...”
Over the next few days, McNally suggested in text messages to Jastremski that he would overinflate the balls — using the terms “watermelons,” “rugby balls” and “balloons” — for the next game.
“The only thing deflating sun..is his passing rating,” he wrote.
They were jokes, apparently. The next game, a home rout of the Chicago Bears, Brady completed 30 of 35 passes for 354 yards and five touchdowns, his best performance of the season.
Brady and the Patriots finished the regular season with a 12-4 record, earning home-field advantage throughout the playoffs — a more meaningful advantage, perhaps, than anyone had suspected.
And at the first playoff game in January, eight days before the scandal erupted, the three men later implicated — McNally, Jastremski and Brady — were in the equipment room, trading pieces of valuable merchandise.
Three weeks later, the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Brady was the game’s M.V.P.