Brady destroyed his phone after being interviewed by Wells and being told the investigator did not need the phone. The League took possession of all of the phones of Team Employees thought to have been involved in this thing, and no texts from Brady about deflating footballs were on these phones. The League ordered the 2 employees to be let go, and eventually allowed the Patriots to reinstate them, with some restrictions on their job duties.
The term deflator showed up once in a text message, in May of 2014 well before the season. And ironically it also showed up in a League video about weight loss 5 years earlier.
Even though the Wells Report distorted the data and did an incomplete analysis, it could only show that possibly the balls were deflated by about 0.2 psi, and in fact alternate explanations did exist for the psi measurements that would not involve deflation.
here is another source of info written by a guy named Steve Mcintyre of Climate Audit - you can google this easily "Deflategate and Errors in the Wells Report"
"Readers in the U.S. are doubtless aware of the “Deflategate scandal”, in which the NFL alleged that Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback of his generation, had conspired with an equipment manager and locker room attendant, to deflate a microscopic amount of pressure from footballs in the AFC championship game. The NFL seemed to be completely taken by surprise by the Ideal Gas Law and the fact that outside temperatures below calibration temperatures would result in much larger deflation without tampering.
The findings depend on the interpretation of statistical data by decision-makers – a topic that interests me. I found the technical report by Exponent, Wells’ technical consultants, to be very unsatisfactory on numerous counts:
although they were reported by Wells to have considered “all permutations”, they hadn’t. On important occasions, they omitted highly plausible possibilities that indicated no tampering and, on other occasions, they only considered assumptions that were most adverse to the Patriots;
on key occasions, it seemed to me that Exponent failed to properly characterize exculpatory results.
At the end of my analysis, I concluded that their key technical findings were simply incorrect and wrote up my analysis, now online here.
I watched both the AFC championship and the final. I have no fan commitment to the Patriots. As someone who’s played sports all his life and whose play has always been rushed, I am amazed at how time seems to stand still for great athletes such as Brady. "
