Sunday night’s Pro Football Talk report on the infamous “11 of 12” report and subsequent PSI testing by the league has put the Deflategate saga back in the spotlight.
It did not take long for those questions about the report to make its way to Roger Goodell as soon as reporters got in his face.
On Wednesday afternoon, Roger Goodell held his annual Super Bowl press conference and sure enough, it would be a Boston Globe reporter who would ask Goodell about the PFT piece.
“The numbers harvested during the 2015 season corroborated this [the Patriots’ football being impacted only be Ideal Gas Law],” Florio wrote. “Which would provide a clear motivation to make those numbers go away, for good. Which is exactly what Pash ordered.”
Throughout the 2015 season, the league vowed to do spot checks on footballs everywhere to make sure they were at proper PSI levels. Oddly, those measurements were never released.
In his new book, Playmakers, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio said that happened at the “direct order” of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash because the data may have exonerated Tom Brady and the Patriots.
The commissioner said he simply didn’t know what happened to them.
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“We were very clear that we were going to do spot checks to make sure people were following the policies. That is something that we fully engaged in. And I don’t know what happened to the data, to be honest with you. We don’t look back at that,” Goodell said. “We just make sure there are no violations. That’s the purpose of the spot checks. Are there violations? And if there are violations we need to look into it. But thankfully we did not see any.”
