Can't Find the Old DG thread, so Here's A New One

[O_P_T]

Apologies if this recent article by Sally Jenkins was already mentioned. It just appeared on the sports page of my local paper.
If you haven't read it, ya gotta:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...003de0-e172-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

In it she writes of a 3rd party brief submitted to the court by Legal scholar Robert Blecker. About the best thing I've read on the whole debacle:

"On Thursday, the second-highest court in the land was to hear oral arguments on whether it should affirm or reverse, on narrow procedural grounds, District Judge Richard Berman’s decision to throw out Goodell’s four-game suspension of Brady. But a little-noticed and powerfully written third-party brief by renowned legal scholar Robert Blecker lays out a third option for the court to consider. Blecker argues that the court should find Goodell’s arbitration process was “infected with bias, evident partiality, unfairness and fraud,” and he doesn’t stop there.

He makes the delightfully explosive suggestion that the appellate court could remand the case to Berman and order the NFL to share its investigative files — which were withheld from Brady’s team during the hearing process, denying him the basic fairness of knowing what the supposed evidence against him was. There are major questions as to whether the league guided the so-called independent investigation and whether Goodell was truly an honest, unbiased arbiter."

The article just gets better from there. So, PFL and other legal eagles, how much influence do 3rd party briefs typically have on judges? Or does it depend on what their clerks emphasize?

Here's Blecker's Brief.

 

[Mazz22]

Apologies if this recent article by Sally Jenkins was already mentioned. It just appeared on the sports page of my local paper.
If you haven't read it, ya gotta:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...003de0-e172-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

In it she writes of a 3rd party brief submitted to the court by Legal scholar Robert Blecker. About the best thing I've read on the whole debacle:

"On Thursday, the second-highest court in the land was to hear oral arguments on whether it should affirm or reverse, on narrow procedural grounds, District Judge Richard Berman’s decision to throw out Goodell’s four-game suspension of Brady. But a little-noticed and powerfully written third-party brief by renowned legal scholar Robert Blecker lays out a third option for the court to consider. Blecker argues that the court should find Goodell’s arbitration process was “infected with bias, evident partiality, unfairness and fraud,” and he doesn’t stop there.

He makes the delightfully explosive suggestion that the appellate court could remand the case to Berman and order the NFL to share its investigative files — which were withheld from Brady’s team during the hearing process, denying him the basic fairness of knowing what the supposed evidence against him was. There are major questions as to whether the league guided the so-called independent investigation and whether Goodell was truly an honest, unbiased arbiter."

The article just gets better from there. So, PFL and other legal eagles, how much influence do 3rd party briefs typically have on judges? Or does it depend on what their clerks emphasize?

Thanks for posting. That is a great brief and great article by Jenkins who has written some real gems during this whole saga. I really hope it has some weight as the judges come to their decision. I can't believe 2 of 3 of them would totally overrule Berman on all 3 points. At least I hope not.

 

[Fawn Lebowitz]

Nope, you don't get it.

This is the most flagrant display of misplaced power that's ever occurred in the NFL. If you can't understand that after a year of blatant lies, incredible overpunishment, and pursuit of more power, then you just don't get it.

The NFL has now spent close to $20 mil on this lie that they've created, money that could be better spent on the $17 mil that they pulled from Boston University's research on CTE program. How can one support and justify spending that kind of money, and then stepping outside of the courthouse door and telling the media that this has dragged on long enough and has been hanging over the NFL's head, something that THEY'VE perpetuated, when they've taken back money that they promised for something that would benefit the players in the long term?

I will always support Brady. No, I wasn't going to quit football when he retires. But what this league has done to him, to the owner, to the team, is despicable and disgusting, what this league has done in terms of little things like letting Blandino, never an official, whisper in the ear of the head official on calls, what this league has done in terms of rule changes and doling out punishments...btw, Talib came right out and said he tried to rip whoever's head it was off purposefully in the AFCCG, and yet, no fine, no punishment, a blatant penalty...has absolutely left a nasty taste in my mouth. And it isn't anything new. This has been building up for a few years.

This sport is no longer a fair sport. These players go out there and kill themselves on that field, work year-long to stay in top shape, dedicate their lives to their craft, and then you have some sloppy suit like Kensil come along with his life-long grudge against a team or a player and destroy the reputation of a player with more integrity than 95% of the rest of the players in the league? You have a headquarters at 345 Park Ave. that is made up of former employees and/or players of one team when they should be unbiased and more varied, from all parts of the country. The scales are tilted in that office, and if you think this is paranoia or being a sore sport, you haven't been paying attention.

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

 

[Mazz22]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

Ah, so you are just an ignorant fool. Thanks for clarifying.

 

[deec77]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

Why would he admit to something mother Nature did. :shrug_n:

~Dee~

 

[bishbash]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

Well Sh*t Dang Howdy, thank you for that totally unique and well proven perspective. I think your post will make everyone of us simple thinking Patriot fans reconsider all that we've previously thought on this subject. I mean, you are so right! How delusional we all are to think that just because Goodell has given some of the largest fines and penalties to the Patriots in NFL history that what really matters is being invited to Kraft's parties.

Why, if enough other team's fans come to your brilliant observations and start reminding us about it this forum just may have to start a thread that looks something like this:
http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=71207

 

[PatsFan09]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

Douchebag Colt fan who knows nothing about DeflateGate but has to come here and spew bullshit.
What a douche.

 

[Mazz22]

Douchebag Colt fan who knows nothing about DeflateGate but has to come here and spew bullshit.
What a douche.

Should have guessed it was a Colt fan ... saw Gramz started a DG thread to try to soothe her own insecurities about Manninhgh* the sexual assaulter. lol. The last month has to have her crying in her tea every morning.

 

[PatsFanLisa]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

Why are you here? To stir the shit? Obviously, you failed 5th grade science, but have faith, you can actually Google things now so that you don't appear so stupid.

The other owners? The Patriots lost a 1st round pick, the team was fined, and the coach was fined $500k. FOR PUTTING A CAMERA IN THE WRONG SPOT.

No, this was more about the other owners being fed up with the genius of our coach perennially putting our team in a position to win, not spending ridiculous amounts of money on two or three players, actually scouting players instead of trying to get the "big" names out of the SEC schools, not jumping on the marquee players in FA, and not hamstringing the team for years. And it's about the brilliance of our quarterback who just wins, no matter what shlep off the street he's throwing to. And the other owners are sick of losing to them and sick of seeing them in the playoffs while they have the Suhs and the Revises and the Peppers that they can't pay other players because of.

AND they're sick of seeing players succeed here while they failed elsewhere. Sick of seeing the dysfunction of their own teams while the locker room in Foxboro is cohesive with no friction.

You should try to not show your lack of intelligence the next time you post. Brady did nothing wrong. But your team did, whichever team it is. Trust me.

 

[PatsFanLisa]

And, by the way, YOUR loser team started this shit show, cheated while doing it, and is owned by a scumbag cheating drug addict. So stop your sanctimonious shit because as far as I'm concerned, Indy fans are just a slight tick above mentally defective. All of them.

And probably are so dumb that they shouldn't be allowed to vote.

 

[patsRmyboys]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

You are dense tool. Read some of the paperwork and not the selected quotes from media idiots.

 

[O_P_T]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy?

And he attends parties with all the owners. So?

Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls?

Or it could just be the Ideal Gas Law as just about all "independent" scientific reporting has said.

For example:

Science News

Deflategate favored foul play over science

Scientist Michael Naughton (expert in condensed matters physics, Buffalo Bills fan) lent his expertise to the matter when the controversy initially blew up. Naughton’s lab at Boston College inflated a football to 13.5 psi at 72° F. Then they stuck it in a fridge and measured the pressure at 42° F (slightly cooler than the low on game night of 47.7° F, the average of measurements from two weather stations near Gillette Stadium). The pressure dropped to 10.5 psi.

HeadSmart labs, a Pittsburgh-based engineering firm that ordinarily conducts research related to helmets and concussions, also turned its attention to the matter. Experiments done by CEO Tom Healy (mechanical engineering Ph.D. student, Patriots fan) and others in the lab (not Patriots fans) simulated field conditions by placing 12 balls inflated to 12.5 psi in a cold room for 2.5 hours. Measurements revealed an average drop of 1.07 psi, well within the range of the halftime measurements. Saturating the balls with water to mimic field conditions bumped the measurements down another 0.75 psi, they conclude in a technical paper. (HeadSmart has launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise research funds to further investigate the matter.)

...

But instead of acknowledging that game day conditions could have accounted for the psi changes, an acknowledgement that wouldn’t preclude other evidence of foul play, the NFL’s Wells Report concludes that there’s an “absence of a credible scientific explanation for the Patriots halftime measurements.”

It would be one thing if the Wells Report (which consulted Daniel Marlow, experimental high energy physics expert at Princeton) just said that additional evidence (bathroom breaks and text messages, among other things) was more compelling than the pressure data. Or if it noted that the pressure data are ambiguous, collected so haphazardly that they wouldn’t be allowed in a high school science fair: Two different gauges that differed by approximately 0.4 psi were used in taking measurements, and it isn’t clear which one was used in the pre-game measurements because those data were not recorded. At halftime, 11 Patriots’ balls and four Colts’ balls were measured, and while all of the Patriots’ balls measured below 12.5 psi, three of the four Colts’ balls also did, according to one of the gauges.

Post-game psi measurements of four Patriots balls ranged from 12.95 to 13.65. These data, the Wells Report acknowledges (in a footnote), “did not provide a scientifically reasonable basis on which to conduct a comparative analysis.” If the report can acknowledge poor methodology for the post-game data, why not acknowledge that for the pre-game and halftime data as well?

Or the NY Times

True Scandal of Deflategate Lies in the N.F.L.’s Behavior

John Leonard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who roots for the Philadelphia Eagles, listens to sports talk radio when he is exercising, and teaches a course called Measurement and Instrumentation. When the Deflategate story broke after last year’s A.F.C. championship game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts, he found himself fixated on it, yearning to dig into it from a scientific point of view.

...

Numbers in hand, Leonard went to work. He bought the same gauges the N.F.L. used to measure p.s.i. levels. He bought N.F.L.-quality footballs. He replicated the temperatures of the locker room, and the colder field. And so on. When he was done, he concluded that Exponent had made a series of basic errors. Leonard’s work showed the exact opposite of Exponent’s conclusions: The drop in the Patriots’ footballs’ p.s.i was consistent with the Ideal Gas Law; the smaller drop in pressure in the Colts’ balls was not. (Leonard surmises that because the Colts’ balls were tested after the Patriots’ balls, they had warmed up again.)

By early November, he had a PowerPoint presentation with more than 140 slides. By the end of the month, he had given two lectures about Deflategate, the second of which he had videotaped and posted on YouTube. A viewer who watched the lengthy lecture edited it down to a crisp 15 minutes; Leonard agreed to let him post the edited version.

The edited lecture went up on YouTube on Dec. 1 and has been viewed more than 17,000 times. It is utterly convincing. Leonard told me that if an M.I.T. undergraduate made the kinds of mistakes that Exponent made, “I would force them to repeat the experiment and correct the analysis.” Based on his study of the data, Leonard now says: “I am convinced that no deflation occurred and that the Patriots are innocent. It never happened.”

He is hardly the only scientist to take that position. As Dan Wetzel pointed out in a recent Yahoo Sports column, scientists at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Boston College, Rockefeller University, the University of Illinois and Bowdoin College — and others — have all come to the same conclusion.

And this is the Yahoo article mentioned by the NYT.

However, once Ted Wells' report was published last spring, including an appendix showing Exponent's work, actual scientists started doing what actual scientists do: review the conclusions of a new study.

As time has allowed more serious analysis to come in, the results have been an overwhelming destruction of the conclusions of Wells, Exponent and the consulting work of Princeton professor Daniel Marlow.

It's been from all directions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (multiple studies), Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Chicago, Boston College, the University of Nebraska, the University of Illinois, the University of New Hampshire, Bowdoin College, Rockefeller University, where a Nobel Prize winner couldn't have lampooned it more viciously, and so on and so on.

Then there were unaffiliated retired scientists, climate experts, professional labs, even the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, which crushed the science of Wells' report. A fourth-grader in Sacramento discredited it for her school science fair.

And these are just some of the ones that received media attention.

About the only counter argument is all these people must all be Patriots fans (they aren't). Even if they all were, they'd be opening themselves up to scientific ridicule for their conclusions from other scientists who aren't Patriots fans.

Only no one is ridiculing them. No one is criticizing these critics. It doesn't appear anyone is fighting back.

Maybe there is a professor or study out there that, with the currently available information, defends Exponent, Wells and the NFL, but there aren't any readily found on the Internet or in scientific journals. They certainly aren't making themselves easy to find.

If every smart scientist who studied this case (and isn't affiliated with the league) says nothing happened, then how long does everyone keep saying something did?

Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action?

"Issues"?

Plural?

Pray tell, what were the other "issues" beyond Spygate?

So docking a first round draft choice and assessing the maximum possible fine, by rule, is "letting them off easy"?

All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

So all TFB+ had to do was admit he did something that all the independent scientists say they didn't do.

Oh and just who is going "scorched earth"?

Who appealed Berman's ruling?

 

[Patriots71]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

No your little puss team got tired of losing over and over and so did a lot of other teams so you cried about air in a ball that made zero difference, not to mention that the league tested the balls all year and would not release the findings. Guess why that is? Your little shit team gets rolled every year and you are looking to blame it on something else. The league is full of children running to tattle on each other when they do not get their way. Your ball boys sit on the sideline with needles taking air out of balls and other teams know it, but no we do not need to look at that, or you tanking games to get draft picks, but no its about integrity, its about crying to the league because your soft team has failed for years and your GM, players and coaches have failed for years. This is why you are over on this page now. The pats live in your head like they do the rest of the league, and all you can do at this point is try to take away enough things to where maybe someday they will come back to the pack so teams do not actually have to coach or work hard to get where they are.

 

[bideau]

Good grief the paranoia runs deep. The commish attends parties at your owners house and yet he's out to get Tommy? Could it be that Tommy did have something to do with psi on those gameday balls? Could it also be that the other owners in the league were fed up with way the commish handled issues with the Patriots and pressured him into action? All of this could have been avoided had Tommy just admitted that he likes the balls a little under inflated after the afc championship game. end of story. But no, he goes scorched earth policy and now we are here.

You're an asshole, but we've always known that.

 

[PatsFanLisa]

You're an asshole, but we've always known that.

And here I was trying to be nice. Until I couldn't anymore.

 

[deec77]

You're an asshole, but we've always known that.

And here I was trying to be nice. Until I couldn't anymore.

Lol love you guys

~Dee~

 

[Hawg73]

And here I was trying to be nice. Until I couldn't anymore.

Which I completely noticed and was impressed with.

I think that Fawn was deliberately trying to push your buttons by drawing a tortured analogy to Peyton Manning, who is just about the only topic Fawn is interested in, and you responded in a very understated manner when a more aggressive response would have been completely understandable.

Good for you.

Now, don't make a habit of it.

 

[PatsFanLisa]

Which I completely noticed and was impressed with.

I think that Fawn was deliberately trying to push your buttons by drawing a tortured analogy to Peyton Manning, who is just about the only topic Fawn is interested in, and you responded in a very understated manner when a more aggressive response would have been completely understandable.

Good for you.

Now, don't make a habit of it.

Not a fvcking chance in hell of that happening.

 

[Dwight Schrute]

This whole clusterfvck is the equivalent of having a murder trial, seeing the presumed victim walk into the courtroom, and saying **** it, we've come this far. Carry on.


Dicks.

 

[skippyx]

I still think Pats fans should class action the NFL for the draft picks.