Patriots: NFL Won’t Study PSI Data From 2015

The NFL randomly tested the PSI of game-day footballs, including the Patriots, throughout the 2015 season. At Super Bowl media week, Roger Goodell confirmed that none of the data would be used for research or study.

Define irony: the NFL spent a ton of time during Super Bowl media week last year talking about the PSI of footballs, and this year, they’ve already…started talking about PSI of footballs again.

After the Naked Gun-esque shenanigans of DeflateGate in 2015, you may remember that the NFL decided to check randomly the PSI of game balls over the course of the season. If you were too locked into Tom Brady’s Mexican standoff with the NFL’s crack team of lawyers to remember, here’s how Pro Football Talk explained what the league was doing this season:

“At designated games, selected at random, the game balls used in the first half will be collected by the [kicking ball coordinator] at halftime, and the League’s Security Representative will escort the KBC with the footballs to the Officials’ Locker room,” the item from the league states. “During halftime, each game ball for both teams will be inspected in the locker room by designated members of the officiating and security crews, and the PSI results will be measured and recorded. Once measured, those game balls will then be secured and removed from play.”

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And here’s the TL;DR Mike Florio version:

“…The league explains that, at randomly-selected games, the primary footballs used by the two teams will be removed from service at halftime for testing.”

Aside from the obvious benefit of removing any of THEM CHEATIN’ FOOTBALLS that were outside regulation air pressure, a common assumption was that the NFL was going to use the measurements they found over the course of the season to crack the mystery of how weather, temperature, baseline measurements, and, of course, our old pal Ideal Gas Law affects the PSI of a football.

But you remember what your dad said about assuming, and it turns out that the NFL is avoiding any research or analysis even more than we were kids in science class trying to get out of doing…well, research and analysis. Rich Eisen asked Roger Goodell on Tuesday whether any PSI data from this season was going to be used for a study, and the answer was a big ol’ NOPE.

From the Boston Globe’s Ben Volin:

The commissioner’s full response to the question reads:

“No, Rich, what the league did this year was what we do with a lot of rules and policies designed to protect the integrity of the game, and that’s to create a deterrent effect. We do spot checks to prevent and make sure the clubs understand that we’re watching these issues. It wasn’t a research study. They simply were spot checks. There were no violations this year. We’re pleased that we haven’t had any violations and we continue the work, obviously, to consistently and importantly enforce the integrity of the game and the rules that are designed to protect it.”

To be completely fair (one might say “independent”), that’s also exactly what Goodell said back in October – that the PSI checks this year were focused on enforcing the rules, not as a scientific study of any kind.

Volin’s second tweet, though, really captures what surely will infuriate Patriots fans and common sense fans alike. Sure, the data the NFL collected this year isn’t enough, by itself, for an actual scientific study on what happens to footballs on game day.

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But it’s SOMETHING, and instead of doing literally anything with the data they collected other than “Welp, looks like everybody’s footballs were regulation pressure this year, YAY!” (Anchorman ‘NEW SUITS!” high-five goes here), the NFL is content to be on its merry way.

And, of course, incomplete data was plenty sufficient to suspend Tom Brady for four games, take New England’s 2016 first-round draft pick and 2017 fourth-round pick; whether we’re talking about knowing the initial PSI of the Patriots’ footballs, assuming that one gauge was used instead of a different gauge that would have produced a different reading, piss-poor data has never stopped a motivated NFL before.

This is the opposite of that. The league has collected information on game ball PSI all year long, and instead of using any of it to learn anything of value, well, it’s probably better to just not do anything with it at all.

The NFL has also said that they may release the PSI findings before the Super Bowl.  Now, again, it’s the opposite of that.  It’s not only Roger Goodell saying that the data that only the NFL would have knowledge of was totally legit; it’s the NFL saying the data in question that they spent all season painstakingly monitoring doesn’t even exist because they weren’t tracking it.

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Which is too bad, because if nothing else, people would surely love to know what happened to the footballs at the sub-freezing Minnesota-Seattle game a few weeks ago.