It's Not Paranoia if Someone is Out to Get You

Finally! It's been forever since there's been a head-scratching, agenda-driven, look at me leak from the Warren Commission Wells Investigation as Deflategate continues to metastasize.

Word.

I went to work in the morning having learned about KBallgate the night before. (We are going to all it KBallgate, aren't we?) It was puzzling, to be sure, and the more I learned the less I seemingly knew.

By the time I was driving home after work the entire story of a rogue Patriots' part-time employee, a locker room attendee named Jim McNally, and his efforts to destroy the integrity of the NFL had started to eat its own tail.

To recap (as best we can know anything at this point):

Kelly Naqi reports on ESPN's Outside the Lines that McNally made a vain attempt to "introduce" an unverified K-Ball (the balls used for kicks, hence K) into the AFC Championship Game. The NFL Official in Charge of K-Balls, Greg Yette, immediately identified the football as lacking the proper bona fides. He then notified the NFL Suit on Site, Mike Kensil, of these obvious shenanigans. Naturally, Kensil measured the air pressure in the game balls, finding 11 of 12 footballs to be 1 to 2 pounds below the lower limit of 12.5 PSI.

Later, Adam Schefter reports that it was one or two different NFL employees who gave McNally the undocumented K-Ball, one of whom has since been fired for putting a Deflategate-related football on eBay. So McNally was only doing what an NFL employee asked him to do. Apparently, there's videotape.

And… scene.

So, nothing to see here, right?

The thing I find interesting about this scenario (even if it's in the process of being debunked) is that it takes the Colts completely out of the equation. It's an official notifying an official who does whatever necessary to secure the integrity of the NFL.

Recently, with the "few ticks below" leak, the theory that the only football that was -2.0 PSI was the football D'Qwell Jackson intercepted and in fact it was someone on the Colts' sideline who tampered with the air pressure.

Colts GM Ryan Grigson was fingered early on as the source for Bob Kravitz – from Indianapolis – who had broken the story on the league's initial investigation. The Colts and Patriots have been rivals for more than a decade. There's definitely bad blood between the two organizations.

This had the Colts fingerprints all over it from the moment the story broke.

But the OTL story? It's just the league doing its job, keeping a sharp eye on those nefarious Patriots and their culture of cheatitude. Why introducing an unapproved K-Ball is something that makes any sense from a skullduggery point of view has yet to be divined. Ockham's Razor suggests that a corrupt, thieving NFL official stashing footballs in his personal cache and giving Jim McNally an unapproved K-Ball makes a lot more sense.

It also has nothing to do with air pressure.

Which is what Kensil checked.

He didn't check the K-Balls to see if there were any more unapproved K-Balls that might destroy the foundation of trust between the league and the gaming industry it's fans.

He checked the air pressure of the game balls.

This starts to look like either an elaborate but shockingly inept attempt to frame the Patriots or the NFL is a clown car of ineptitude. Maybe it's both.

Keep in mind…

At this point, short of a confession, the NFL simply cannot prove the Patriots tampered with the footballs in the AFC Championship game. There are no measurements from the time the officials approved and initialized the game balls so we have no idea what (if any) difference there was between then and the halftime gauging of the game balls. 

Environmental factors aside, a game ball measured at 11.5 PSI at halftime could have been 11.5 PSI when they were approved, signed and initialed, two and a half hours before kickoff. There's been plenty of science and formulae and deconstruction of the ideal gas law that provides proof we shouldn't be surprised by a loss of 1 to 2 PSI, given the game's temps and precipitation. 

Whether or not you believe that science is a thing or not; however, there's no way to prove otherwise, because no baseline was taken. You can't prove A > B if you don't know the value of both A and B. Why are we still doing this? The NFL admitted before the Super Bowl they didn't have any record of the PSI for those footballs when they were approved by the officials.

Why are we still doing this?

Are there people in the NFL league office that are out to get the Patriots? I start to think so. I find myself hoping not that we find out the Colts tampered with one football to frame the Pats but that the Wells Investigation instead finds it was someone in the league office. Heads should roll. Mike Kensil, I'm looking at you.

If it was the Colts and the league hits them with a seven figure fine and docks them a 1st round draft pick, well, yeah. I'd be okay with that, too.

I suppose it could be both.