Rogah has taken a lot of heat for defending the Patriots' position in previous threads but I think he should be commended for being the OP on this thread and for being willing to start a discussion on the Wells Report, the findings of which I gather may not have been what he had hoped for or expected.
I've given the report a very cursory review and also quickly skimmed through Appendix I, which is the Exponent technical report. As time allows I'd like to give the Exponent report a more closer read.
Link to the 243-page report:
https://nfllabor.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/investigative-and-expert-reports-re-footballs-used-during-afc-championsh.pdf
Earlier in the year I posted on two related threads (
Let's Ponder The Deflategate Issue and
So Now, Robert Kraft Thinks His Team Will Be Owed An Apology?) and I believed then that if Mortensen's findings were accurate, the drop in pressure of the Patriots' footballs could not be accounted for by weather conditions alone (I qualified my comments back then with uncertainty as to the accuracy of Mortensen's initial report). It now looks like Exponent's findings confirm my calculations and conclusions.
I was glad to see that Exponent's controlled simulations were more representative of game-time conditions than the experiments conducted by Tom Healey of Carnegie-Mellon (whose experiment I critiqued in one of the above mentioned threads). In fact, Exponent simulated game conditions for ball wetness and exposure time in line with my criticisms of the Healey experiment. I felt vindicated in seeing that.
I also felt vindicated in reading Exponent's report because I had also critiqued the Patriots' argument that by vigorously rubbing the balls as part of their pre-game ball prep the pressure inside the balls would have risen. I said that such rise in pressure would be short-lived as the rise in temperature of the football skin/bladder and inside air would begin to drop off and equilibrate to ambient conditions once the ball boys ceased rubbing the balls. Exponent confirmed this too.
While it appears I spent more time running calculations with real time data (inside the locker room, at the start of the game, at halftime) plugged into the Ideal Gas Law than did Exponent, their statistical analysis and attempt to simulate real-time conditions seems to make their report findings irrefutable. In my short time looking at the report I see no flaws, unlike the Healey experiment which some in the media looked to in defense of the Patriots.
I don't know where this will lead or what a fair penalty would be, but it does finally seem clear after nearly four months that something was deliberately done to NE's game balls that was not done to Indy's.
