Did the American Enterprise Institute just nuke Roger Goodell and the #Deflategate Wells Report? Hint: Yes!

Greg P. | 7:04 AM on June 18, 2015

If you’re a Tom Brady and New England Patriots fans, your new best friend is the American Enterprise Institute who just might have exonerated the star QB of charges that he intentionally deflated footballs before last year’s playoff game with the Indianapolis Colts.

From Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post:

The NFL paid millions for a fundamentally flawed report by lawyer Ted Wells that made Brady and the Patriots out to be slam-dunk guilty, based on more than 100 pages of mathematical analysis of ball pressurization . . . that turns out to be erroneous. The AEI’s report totally rejects the finding that the footballs used by the Patriots in the AFC championship game had a significant drop in air pressure compared with those used by the Colts. But the truly damning sentence is this one, buried in its erudite phrasings and equations: “The Wells report’s statistical analysis cannot be replicated by performing the analysis as described in the report,” the AEI concludes.

Basically, the math didn’t add up. It’s a standard principle in science: If you can’t replicate a set of results, then there is a problem with it. A flaw or a fraud is at work. Either you made a mistake, or you made it up.

When the AEI analysts looked more closely at how such a mistake could have been made, what they found “astonished” them, says the report’s co-author Stan Veuger. The Wells report “relies on an unorthodox statistical procedure at odds with the methodology the report describes.” Translation: The Wells report said it would use one equation but then used a different (and weird) equation to arrive at its numbers.

“It was really clumsy,” Veuger says. “It’s the kind of mistake you’d see in freshman statistics class.”