exponent

Did McNally Inflate One Football in the Washroom?

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.

Exponent’s Trick to Exaggerate the Decline

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.