Brady’s Deflategate suspension unjustified, says renowned Canadian climate change skeptic

At least one Canadian analyst thinks New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady got a bum rap over the so-called Deflategate scandal.

Last week, Brady exhausted his appeals and will serve a leagueimposed, four-game suspension at the start of next season. Steve McIntyre argues that Brady was wrongfully convicted on the strength of faulty science.

McIntyre, reached at home in Toronto, is a veteran Canadian mining executive, an avid NFL fan and a gold medal winner at the World Masters Games in squash doubles. He is best known internationally, however, for his work on climate science with University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick. In a published, peer-reviewed paper, the two famously discredited the so-called hockey-stick graph, purported by climate alarmists to show unprecedented global warming.

McIntyre and his colleague found that the same methodology, but with random numbers instead of actual data plugged in, also generated a hockey stick-shaped graph. He had seen this before. His suspicions were initially aroused by his experience in the financial sector where graphs shaped like a hockey stick are automatically deemed indicative of a scam.

Hardly less contrarian is his thinking on Deflategate. While the NFL is officially convinced that Brady illegally used underinflated footballs in last year’s conference championship — the idea being to get a better grip on the ball for passing — McIntyre thinks otherwise. Based on exhaustive analysis of all the available evidence, including transcripts, investigative reports and expert evidence, he says that conclusion is based on faulty science apparently overlooked or ignored by everyone involved.

Science was key in the case against Brady. As part of their damning analysis, engineers retained by the league performed an experiment to duplicate conditions to which the suspect Patriots game balls were subjected. This includes “rubbing up” the new balls with a pair of coarse gloves, something that always was done for Brady by an equipment manager. According to uncontested testimony, he rubbed up the balls, then checked with a gauge to confirm their pressure was within legal specifications. Tested again later by game officials, the footballs had cooled, which reduced their pressure to less than that allowed.

By McIntyre’s calculations, the low pressures found by officials match almost perfectly with what physics would predict.

“I’m sure that’s what happened,” he says. There is no need to have a Patriots functionary, operating under Brady’s orders, sneaking a bag full of footballs into a team bathroom and secretly releasing tiny and exactly equal amounts air from eight of 11 of them, as the league implausibly alleges.

Attempted re-enactment by engineers should have confirmed this, McIntyre says. For some reason, however, they initially took pressure readings before the balls were rubbed up, not after, as the team did. When they later retested, pressures again were normal because the balls had returned to ambient temperature. Had the engineers rubbed up the balls before the initial tests, they would have seen reduced pressures on the later test, just as the game officials did. Instead, they used incorrect results based on flawed methodology as evidence of tampering.

So why wasn’t this at issue during all of the various hearings?

McIntyre says Brady’s lawyers were preoccupied with less tenable lines of argument having to do with multiple faulty pressure gauges. Then they argued unfair process. The science went all but unquestioned.

As part of his own analysis, McIntyre noticed in the expert scientific evidence a mislabelled chart of football pressure changes presented as evidence against Brady. The chart purports to represent measurements taken with a reliable pressure gauge when they actually were taken with a suspect gauge.

“To me, this is a big deal,” McIntyre said. He contacted the physics professor at Princeton University who reviewed the chart before it came into evidence. The response was as expected.

“Of course, I heard nothing back.”

McIntyre hates to see Brady suspended when he should have been vindicated. What he hates even more is the harm done by bad science.

“With the stakes as high as they are, you expect more from the scientists.”