Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Roger Goodell: I don’t know what happened to the data from 2015 air pressure spot-checks

nVOMIDv6XsWB
Patriots Linebackers Coach Jarod Mayo joins Mike Florio and Chris Simms to discuss his journey to coaching with New England, if he thinks Tom Brady would return to playing in the NFL and more.

An excerpt from Mike Florio’s forthcoming book Playmakers posted to PFT on Tuesday looked at some aspects of Deflategate, notably what happened when the league performed spot-checks on the air pressure of footballs around the league during games in 2015.

The results of those checks were never revealed, but a source told Florio that the results were consistent with the assumption that pressure would increase in hot temperatures and decrease on colder days. Those findings were also consistent with the findings in footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game win over the Colts that touched off the entire investigation.

That outcome calls into question the punishments handed down to the Patriots and Tom Brady and Florio’s source contends the findings were expunged by NFL general counsel Jeff Pash. At a Wednesday press conference, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked if that was the case and he said he didn’t know the answer.

“We were very clear that we were going to do spot-checks to make sure people were following the policies,” Goodell said. “That is something 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. We just make sure there’s no violations. That is the purpose of the spot-checks. Are there violations? And if there are violations we look into it. Thankfully, we did not see any.”

It’s hard to imagine the results of the spot-checks would have remained out of sight if they backed up discipline for what happened in the AFC title game and that, in turn, makes it easier to believe that the decision to keep them under wraps was made because of the opposite conclusion.