So you think Tom Brady is a cheater…(thread)

8 views Nov 10, 2025 ~8 min read

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So you think Tom Brady is a cheater…(thread)

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First, Brady was punished exactly once for “cheating”. He was not punished for “Spygate” (which consisted of a cameraman standing in the wrong place while taking a video of something that was in plain view of 80,000 people), nor was he punished for serving warm Gatorade.

He was only ever accused of one thing, which he was also suspended for: Being “at least generally aware” that other people were tampering with balls (which itself was never proved).

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Not for tampering with equipment. Not for ordering other people to tamper with equipment. Not for  having Human Growth Hormone shipped to his house under his pregnant wife’s name.

Nope, just for being “generally aware” that other people were doing bad stuff.

‘Course, they weren’t exactly sure, but “close enough” is sufficient to suspend the greatest player in the history of the sport for 25% of the season, I guess, even though the rules called for a $12k fine...

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So, exactly how did the army of Gil Grissoms at 345 Park Avenue come to the conclusion that the footballs had been tampered with? Simple! They measured them at halftime, and found that they had dropped below their pre-game pressure of 12.5 PSI! AHA! BUSTED!!!

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After all, everyone knows that the only way a football can lose pressure is by someone sticking a needle into it and letting air out. Right? 
Right??
Uh, no.

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Turns out there’s a little thing called the Ideal Gas Law, which you probably covered in high school science class. The IGL says that the pressure inside a closed vessel rises and falls with its temperature. Translation: When a football gets colder, the pressure goes down.

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In the case of the 2014 AFC Championship Game, the Patriots’ footballs were inflated to 12.5 PSI in a 72-degree locker room, then brought to a 48-degree football field, whereupon the PSI dropped--coming as no surprise to 10th-grade Physics Club members.

How much pressure did they lose? Glad you asked:
‘Course, you may have thought they lost a lot more, probably because of our buddy @mortreport’s infamous tweet:

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As you can plainly see, “11 of 12 Patriots footballs” were NOT underinflated by 2 PSI, in fact NONE of the footballs were underinflated by 2 PSI, but when it comes to bashing the New England Patriots, the truth is optional.

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As such, Mort’s tweet was believed unquestioningly as the gospel truth, was broadcast far & wide, such that everyone knew the numbers by rote, and was waved in every Patriot fan’s face as “further proof” of Belichick’s dirty pool.

There was just one problem: It was all BULLSHIT.

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Oh, sure, the truth came out, when the Wells Report was published and @mortreport was exposed for the headline-grabbing clickwhore he is. But not to worry. He left the tweet up for months more, ensuring that it was irrevocably emblazoned on everyone’s memory, before deleting it.

It’s always the same story: Piss on the Patriots, bask in the mouse clicks, then apologize when people have moved on and no one’s listening.

Oh… you didn’t know they apologized? Of course you didn’t.

“This is all fine and good,” you say, “but those footballs were still underinflated. And if this was due to the Ideal Gas Law, then the Colts’ footballs would’ve been underinflated too!”

Quite right.
Wow. What do you know?

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Oh, not important at all, but the refs didn’t even measure most of Indy’s footballs, and of the 4 they did, they screwed up the measurements and had to throw one of them out. No one cared, but had this happened to the Patriots’ footballs, @getnickwright would’ve called the FBI.

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Whenever debating this issue on here, I always ask the same question: If both teams’ footballs lost pressure, why was only one team punished? I get one of two responses:
-Block/mute/no reply
-"Because of the Patriots’ history of cheating!"

Wrong.

The NFL did NOT say, “Well, Colts, you tampered with your balls, but we’re gonna let you off the hook this time because you’ve been good.” The league specifically found Indy completely innocent:

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This is a perfect example of lazy, brain dead, tiki torch-carrying shoepissers making things up out of whole cloth, and Patriot nation having to do the research to set them straight, which is a travesty in itself.

The NFL’s position, then, is that both teams’ footballs lost pressure, but one team tampered and the other didn’t. To explain this, they seize on “differences in the pressure drops,” i.e., “yes, both teams’ footballs lost pressure, but the Patriots’ footballs lost MORE!!”

The exact difference in the drops is 0.64. Any 12-yr-old with a spreadsheet could’ve calculated this, yet the NFL gave us a range. I’m guessing this was for appearances; it would be pretty goddamn embarrassing to spend $22.5M to investigate less than ¾ of a pound of pressure.

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Let’s pause for a moment to recap.
Remember the punishments that were handed down in this case:
-Brady suspended 4 games
-Patriots docked 1st- and 4th-round picks
-Patriots fined $1M

All of the above...over 0.64 PSI
***0.64***.

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“It’s illegal to tamper with footballs, no matter whether it’s 0.64, or 99.64,” you say. “Cheating is cheating.”
Ahh, but what makes you so sure it was tampering? What makes the NFL so sure?

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Read the Wells Report, carefully, and you will see that NFL researchers identified two main factors that caused footballs to lose pressure: temperature drop and moisture...

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...specifically, they conducted an experiment: They took a 12.5 PSI ball, cooled it to 48 degrees (the temp. on the field that day), then sprayed it with water (it was raining during the game), & the ball measured 11.27 PSI.

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The average PSI of the Patriots’ balls at halftime of the game in question? 
11.30.

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That’s right: When the NFL’s own scientists reproduced the conditions of the 2014 AFCCG on a  football, it measured within 0.03 PSI of the actual footballs from the game.
0.03.
THERE WAS NO UNEXPLAINED PRESSURE LOSS IN THE PATRIOTS’ FOOTBALLS.

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“Well then why did the Colts’ footballs lose less pressure than the Patriots’ footballs?” you ask. 

Simple: Because they *didn’t* “lose less”: They GAINED BACK MORE.

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The Colts’ balls were inflated to 13.0 PSI before the game. The NFL repeated the same experiment (cooled to 48 deg. & sprayed with water) on a 13.0 PSI ball, and it measured 11.75.
The average PSI of the Colts’ balls at halftime?
12.47.
-which is 0.72 PSI *higher* than expected.

This shouldn’t surprise you.
The NFL’s researchers found that when a football was brought from a cold environment to a warm one, it regained pressure, as required by the Ideal Gas Law. Figure 22 shows how much pressure the football gained, minute by minute:

Note that the wet Colts football started out at 11.75 PSI, and after almost 14 minutes, had increased to 12.7.
Also according to the NFL’s report, the officials took 2-4 mins to prepare and another 4-5 mins to measure the Patriots’ footballs (6-9 minutes total).

Here’s Figure 22 again, with the 6-9 minute period highlighted. Note the PSI was at 12.6 at the end of this period, an increase of nearly a full pound from the original 11.75 PSI.

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This being the case, it seems perfectly reasonable that the Colts’ balls could’ve gained back that 0.72 while the Patriots’ balls were being measured.

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To summarize, the Patriots’ footballs were measured near the beginning of halftime, and almost exactly matched the pressure of the football from the beginning of the “halftime period” that the NFL reproduced in their experiments…

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...while the Colts’ footballs were measured near the middle/end of the halftime period, and closely matched the PSI of the NFL’s football from a corresponding period in their experiment. Where’s the issue?

“But wait,” you say. “Figure 27 in the Wells report shows that the average of the Patriots’ halftime measurements (straight red line) is far lower than the range of measurements in the NFL’s experiments. It looks like the PSI of the Patriot footballs was too low!”

Yeah, it sure LOOKS that way. You know why? Because the NFL’s super-smart, very pricey researchers screwed up.

Read here for more info on where they went wrong:
backpicks.com/2015/07/25/def…

Here’s the corrected chart, which--what do you know--shows that the *Patriots’* footballs were right where we’d expect them to be, and the Colts’ balls were too high.
Again: WHERE IS THE ISSUE??

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“Well, okay, but what about those ominous-sounding text messages from Jim McNally and John Jastremski?” you ask. “It certainly sounds like they were up to something fishy!”

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Pump the brakes, bro.
Unless you found something wrong with my analysis above, which I’m pretty damn sure you didn’t, there’s no unexpected PSI loss in the Patriots’ footballs. The PSI was right where it should have been. If someone tampered, it would’ve been lower.
It wasn’t.

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McNally and Jastremski turned in their phones to the NFL. They were grilled multiple times by Ted Wells and his goon squad, once (in McNally’s case) for 8 hours straight, and there’s not one quote in the entire report. What does that tell you?

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...it tells you they didn’t confess to anything, they didn’t implicate themselves or each other, and they didn’t contradict themselves. After multiple interviews with multiple officials, the NFL didn’t get one *gotcha*. From anyone.

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Simply stated, this entire debacle was a ridiculous, biased, scientifically flawed, $22.5 million-dollar temper tantrum by 31 infantile billionaire owners who were tired of getting their nuts ripped out by Tom Brady.

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The NFL’s own experiments proved that Brady was *innocent*, but @nflcommish punished him anyway, simply because his bosses ordered him to, and he loved his exorbitant salary and his private jet way too much to give them up.

You have NOTHING on Brady.

Weep. /endrant

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@nflcommish @threadreaderapp thread pls

So you think Tom Brady is a cheater…(thread)

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