The Morning Win: Debate over Tom Brady's integrity settled by Kentucky science fair
Hey, remember Deflategate?
It was somehow only four years ago that we all learned a whole lot about the NFL's specifications for football inflation after the Patriots, possibly at the behest of Tom Brady himself, used deflated footballs in their AFC Championship Game throttling of the Indianapolis Colts.
Like all great scandals, it started with lots of intrigue and a bunch of hilarious details -- the Patriots, you may recall, referred to the dude who deflated the footballs as "The Deflator" then tried to claim it was because he had recently lost weight -- and ended in a mire of dense and boring legalese. Brady eventually served a four-game suspension for his role and the Patriots paid a $1 million fine and gave up two draft picks, but not before enough legal proceedings to render the whole controversy tedious.
Then it all kind of.... went away. People definitely know that it happened, and we recall the suspension because it allowed Jimmy Garoppolo to become a thing, but, man. Look: I cover baseball most of the time, and all I'm trying to say is that if a superstar like Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez wound up the most valuable player on a World Series-bound team after his PED suspension, it would occupy some 70% of baseball-media bandwidth.
With Brady, it's a footnote. But thankfully we have heroes like 10-year-old Ace Davis of Lexington, Ky. to keep the memory of Deflategate alive. Davis won his school science fair with a project that asked, "Is Tom Brady a cheater?" and concluded, "Tom Brady is indeed a cheater."
Davis, a quarterback himself, conducted tests on footballs inflated to various PSI to determine Brady's guilt. The project board shows photos of him throwing and catching footballs. As someone who once did a science-fair project on the structural properties of different types of sand as an excuse to build sand castles for school, I heartily commend Davis for figuring out a way to make having a football catch count as homework.
Thursday's big winner
Barack Obama. Though the details are sketchy, the former president got to meet the Golden State Warriors while they were in Washington to defeat the Wizards. We don't know much about the meeting, but we know Obama's a basketball fan, and so you have to hope he'd still be pretty jazzed about hanging out with Kevin Durant and Steph Curry even after spending eight years of his life as the leader of the free world.
Quick hits
- Patrick Mahomes appears to have exactly the right approach to golf. Golf should involve far less walking around and far more crushing the hell out of the ball. Not even waiting for the golf balls to stop moving is a fun twist.
- Lamelo Ball isn't going to play in the McDonald's All-American game because of his stint playing professionally in Lithuania. Also because they might ask him to pass.
- Chad Johnson, née Ochocinco, was among the first to report the arrest of Roger Stone. This world is increasingly weird and occasionally wonderful.
This day in dumb sports
Young Ace Davis isn't the first to use science to prove the Patriots lying cheaters. Bill Nye, one of the world's foremost science guys, did it on Good Morning America on this day four years ago.