This is probably much like arguing politics – I think both sides are fairly intractable. The Wells report addressed and completely understood the ideal gas law. Indy’s balls deflated due to the decrease in temperature, as did New England’s. The ideal gas law does not, however, ever dictate that New England’s balls, being initially inflated at a lower PSI, would decrease over twice as much as Indy’s. Lots of “if this gauge was used, and they waited x minutes, and the balls were damp…” and so on, to try to come up with a scenario to explain it, but as the Wells report considered, that was highly unlikely. But, as the Wells report also said, even throwing out the science, there was more than enough evidence to know what was going on.
Clearly, holding the NFL to a prosecutorial standard shows them lacking (time and time again!), but any reasonable person, after seeing the texts between Jastremski and McNally, knows that there was a longstanding effort to underinflate the balls, and Brady was aware. Was it deserving of a 4 game suspension? No. Do other teams do something similar? I would say yes. When the NFL got wind of what NE was doing, they should have just told them to knock it off. They brought all of this on themselves.
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