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Buried deep in the Wells report is an anecdote wild enough to merit Hollywood treatment.
About 20 minutes before the AFC Championship Game, with a Super Bowl berth in the balance, referee Walt Anderson made a startling discovery. The official bag of inspected and approved game balls, which customarily remains in the officials' dressing room until it is time to take the field, had vanished. Its disappearance soon pressed the NFL's Keystone Cops into action.
A league security official checked every corner of the dressing room. No bag of footballs. He looked in a nearby room. Nothing there. Soon, he was walking hurriedly toward the field, hoping there had been a miscommunication. No dice. As he was rushing to find a set of backup balls, Anderson finally found the originals with Jim McNally, the New England Patriots' designated attendant to the officials' locker room.
As the Wells report revealed in great detail, McNally had spurned protocol, grabbed the bag amid unusual pregame chaos and quietly spent 1 minute, 40 seconds with it behind a closed door. The report didn't pin down exactly what McNally did during that time, but when the balls were tested at halftime, all but one registered a reduced pounds per square inch.
Much has been said about the morality of Deflategate. There will be plenty written on the extent to which it might have helped the Patriots win Super Bowl XLIX, along with its impact on the legacies of coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.
But as a practical matter, it is preposterous that NFL protocol was flimsy enough to allow a low-level employee to make off undetected with the most fundamental building block of the game, one the league takes great care to inspect and approve. You can bet that will change -- and quickly.
After listening to and speaking with people around the league on Wednesday, it is inevitable the NFL will tighten its pregame procedure. A league spokesman said at the Super Bowl that the protocol would be reviewed this offseason, and the details of the Wells report demand a restriction in pregame access to game balls. The most likely scenario, it appears, is applying the league's stringent K-ball policy to all footballs.
"It will change dramatically," said ESPN analyst Bill Polian, who spent two decades on the league's competition committee. "It's very simple, by the way. The game balls can be handled and in the custody of a league official, just the way the kicking balls are handled. That will certainly, I'm sure, will take place, and then beyond that we'll see if they want to do anything else. But it's a rather simple fix and one that I'm sure will be implemented rather quickly."
To limit doctoring and provide an equal playing field on kicking plays, the NFL arranges for Wilson Sporting Goods to deliver a set of balls directly to the referee on the week of the game. They are carried into the stadium in a sealed box and marked for use only in the kicking game, as the Wells report notes.
One representative of each team "breaks in" the balls to his place-kicker's specifications. Guidelines limit the tools, methods and time (45 minutes) that can be used. A kicking-ball "coordinator" supervises this process and retains custody of the balls thereafter. Moving forward, the NFL seemingly has no choice but to employ a coordinator to monitor pregame access it gives teams to any game balls, whether they will be used for kicking or not.
As silly as it all sounds, this is the length the league must go to at least close the loopholes teams have thus far identified to seek a competitive advantage. Once the competition committee settles on a plan, it will be the easiest rule change in NFL history. Never again, I think it's fair to say, will the NFL lose a bag of game balls minutes before a championship game.