I’ve submitted an article entitled “New Light on Deflategate: Critical Technical Errors” pdf to Journal of Sports Analytics. It identifies and analyzes a previously unnoticed scientific error in the technical analysis included in the Wells Report on Deflategate.
In today’s post, I’m going to show the Deflategate data from a new perspective. Rather than arguing about whether the Patriots used the Logo gauge, I’ve assumed, for the sake of argument, the NFL’s conclusion that the Non-Logo gauge was used, but gone further (as they ought to have done). I’ve “guessed” the amount of deflation that would be required to yield the observations. And, instead of only considering the overall average, I plotted each data point and how the “guessed” deflation would reconcile each data point.
On June 29, I sent a letter to Ted Wells, notifying him of the erroneous description of key figures in the Exponent report, but did not receive any acknowledgement. In the presumption that Daniel Marlow of Princeton is more likely to be concerned about the erroneous research record (as well as having obligations that the research record be properly presented) I sent him a similar letter today, copying lawyers Daniel Goldberg and Jeffrey Kessler.
Dear Dr Marlow,
In an earlier article, I pointed out that essential figures in the Exponent report contained (what appeared to be) an important misrepresentation: that transients purporting to represent Logo gauge initialization had not really been initialized with the Logo gauge. The same point was later (and independently) made in a technically oriented sports blog.
The transcript of the Brady appeal before Goodell has been released and it’s astonishing to see how the sausage was made. It raises many issues, one of which I’ll discuss in today’s post.
Further to my series of posts on Deflategate, reader chrimony observed that my statistical analysis had shown that it was possible that there had been no tampering, but had not excluded the possibility of tampering. This is a sensible observation, but raises the question of whether and how one could use the available statistical information to exclude tampering. This is analysis that ought to have been done in the Wells Report. I’ve done the analysis in this post and the results are sharper than I’d anticipated.
In my first writeup, I observed that Exponent’s Logo transients appeared to be bodged too high, even with their unwarranted and adverse use of 67 deg F initialization (Exponent’s “temperature trick”). In today’s post, I’ve taken a closer look at the seemingly questionable calculation of the transients at 67 deg F, showing that the Patriot transients make sense only if initialization for the transients purporting to show Logo Gauge initialization were not actually initialized at 12.5 psi using the Logo Gauge (as stated and as is the purpose of the diagram).
One of the ironies of the NFL’s conduct in this affair is that it can be established that NFL officials (under the supervision of NFL Executive Vice President Troy Vincent) over-inflated Patriot balls at half-time, the only proven tampering with Patriot balls. Brady and the Patriots were unaffected by the overinflation by NFL officials, as they destroyed the Colts in the second half.
