Could someone translate this into European for me please.
In handegg, each team is allowed to supply their own balls. This was done because it used to be the home team supplied all the balls and the quality was inconsistent game to game, so Brady and another player named Peyton Manning sought to have a rule brought in so that each team could supply their own balls.
The game is played asynchronously, so the attacking (offensive) team plays with their ball. If they fail to advance the ball a certain distance inside a set of parameters the game is stopped, the offensive team returns their ball to their sideline, becomes the defensive team, and the other team brings their ball onto the field as the attackers.
Before every game, officials measure the balls for pressure. They do with without checking the calibration of the gauges, or recording the temperature in the room,
and they record the measurements by writing down some numbers on cocktail napkins and losing them. They then allow the team equipment managers to do whatever they want with the balls. Someone saw Brady's ball handler take a sack of approved balls into a washroom. Nobody knows what went on in that washroom, but some insinuate there was serious deflating going on.
Later, during the game, the opposing team got a hold of one of Brady's team balls. This happened when Brady threw the ball but it was intercepted by the opposing team. When the opposition player felt the ball, he became concerned it was outside of the regulation pressure, so he had an equipment manger on his own team measure the ball. The opposing equipment manager then informed the league that the measurement was below regulation. Also equipment managers shouldn't just be sticking needles in balls after they've been signed off on at the beginning of the game for obvious reasons but everyone's ignoring that. Also no one seems to think a rival team could possibly let air out of an opponent's ball to start shit.
So during half-time the officials measured all the Patriot balls, and started measuring all the opposing team's balls to isolate for temperature, moisture, etc. but got bored halfway through and only measured like 4 of the opposition's balls,
three of which were under-inflated but who cares (or maybe not because they used two different gauges which gave different measurements). So in the second half the Patriots were using the same footballs, but reinflated to the correct standard by the officials. Or maybe they used backup balls.
No one really knows. And they also can't say if they balls were purposely under-inflated by a large degree, or if they balls were at the minimum allowed and simply lost some pressure due to temperature changes and the normal loss of pressure that comes with handing Brady's balls.
Again, the pre-game measurements we could use to compare don't actually exist.
Then there were a bunch of texts between Brady's equipment managers talking about ball pressure:
McNally: Tom [Brady] sucks...im going make that next ball a fuckin balloon
Jastremski: Talked to him last night. He actually brought you up and said you must have a lot of stress trying to get them done...
Jastremski: I told him it was. He was right though...
Jastremski: I checked some of the balls this morn... The refs fucked us...a few of then were at almost 16
Which suggests that Brady might have been asking them to under-inflate the ball... but all it does is suggest that NFL officials tend to over-inflate the ball beyond the 12.5-13.5 PSI standard.
So now then the NFL wants to get Brady's phone. The NFL's player's union tells Brady to not hand over his phone, because they really don't want to set a precedent where the NFL can just comb through the texts of any of their players for specious reasons.
The NFL then decides to go ahead an suspend Brady for... oh, I dunno, a few games... let's say 4. Then Brady and his team ask the NFL to explain how they arrived at 4 games, how they determined Brady instructed the equipment managers to deflate the balls, and where exactly it was in the NFL rulebook that deflating balls would lead to a player suspension. The NFL then said it could do what it wanted, Brady took them to court, the judge told the NFL that no, it cannot just make up rules and penalties, and here we are.