Tom Brady, Revisited

The New England Patriots have responded to Deflategate like true Bostonians, according to Boston.com.  They don't think their quarterback has done anything wrong, they think the punishment is undeserved and over-reaching, and they are defending Tom Brady to the moon and beyond.

That's fine.  They're fans. There's a certain amount of loyalty, even over-the-top loyalty, within that community.
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Brady's agent's ad hominem attacks on Ted Wells were uncalled for, and spoke to me of desperation. If you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.... although that has never convinced me of anything except the hater's lack of imagination and the eventual veracity of the message.
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Sporting News has the best reporting on the controversy.  There is a certain snide cynicism attached to the stories in USA Today and CBS Sports and the other websites which Google deemed worthy of my attention.

Sporting News was the only site to link to the actual report written for the Patriots.  After a while, I found myself screaming at Lenore the Laptop, begging for a reference to the original material.

All that time spent in The University of Chicago's Great Books program has made an indelible impact on me.  I need the source material, not the analysis.
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The source material written for the Patriots has a lot of italics and bold print.  There are many links to experts and evidence.

It's fun to see the battle of the scientific minds - a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (for the Patriots) versus the former chair of the physics department at Princeton (you remember, where Albert Einstein found a home).  Perhaps there's one little fan who's seeing a connection between his sport and his schooling.

One can only hope.
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There are lengthy discussions of The Ideal Gas Law in both the Wells and Goldberg reports.

That's PV=nRT.

I know this because it was a clue in a crossword puzzle I was working the night before the Goldberg report was released.  I love the serendipitous overlapping of my passions.
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Daniel L Goldberg, the author of The Wells Report in Context, sat in on the interviews held in Gillette Stadium.

I suppose that allows him to provide his version of context. He could set the scene, describe his impressions, talk about his own reactions.

But, as TBG has said over and over since we were in the midst of our own maelstrom,

The higher the amplitude of an event, the greater the individual differences.

We cannot choose to judge or interpret another's reaction.  

I'm guessing that this was pretty high on the Richter scale for the overweight game day locker room attendant, and for those higher on the totem pole, too.

We need context for our context, I guess.
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Goldberg tells us that the attendant was called "the deflator" because he was trying to lose weight, not because he took the air out of the footballs.

I suppose it could be true.  I suppose the nickname could have a double meaning, too.

Context, it seems, is everything.
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There are CAPITAL LETTERS THROUGHOUT THE GOLDBERG REPORT.  It's as irritating to read them there as it was to type them here.

Have we gotten to the point that a well crafted sentence is not enough to make a point?

It's another sign of the dumbing down of America.  And that's where I am leaving this issue, forever, I hope.

If Americans would pay attention to our crumbling infrastructure with the same intensity brought to grown men playing games for a living.......