Two days ago, Roger Goodell appeared on Rich Eisen’s podcast to talk about various topics, among them Deflategate and the league mandated pressure level tests tied to the scandal/farce. The NFL commissioner said that those tests were simple "spot checks" to ensure every team follows the rules.
They were not, Goodell stated, part of a research study on how atmospheric conditions can influence the air pressure levels inside footballs. He also said that there were "no violations", which naturally led to questions about the league’s method and its relationship to the Ideal Gas Law.
Yesterday, one of Goodell’s underlings – vice president of officiating Dean Blandino – appeared on Sirius XM and offered a little more context to what his boss said on Tuesday (via Ben Volin):
We did spot checks throughout the year, and we measured PSI levels and recorded that information. So right now we’re evaluating the information. We didn’t have any violations this year, but again we’re still in that evaluation phase to look at the information and then we’ll see what that tells us.
From the Patriots’ perspective, this sounds a little more optimistic than what Goodell said two days ago. If the league in fact analyzes the data properly (not a given although there were quite a few games that would be useful), it will find out that pressure levels fluctuate throughout the course of a game because of the instability of the surrounding environment.
Will the league come to this conclusion, though? And will it share the data? Those questions still remain and until the league helps answer them, we are still left in the dark about what was actually recorded and how the information is evaluated.