Brady was innocent

Tom Brady was innocent.

You’re welcome to dislike him. Maybe he beat your team in the playoffs one too many times. Maybe it’s the hair. But you can’t fairly hold Deflategate against him, because the evidence that convicted him in the court of public opinion was mostly a weather report.

The physics nobody wrote down

The footballs in question were used in the AFC Championship Game in January 2015, on a cold, rainy night in Foxborough. At halftime, the Patriots’ footballs measured below the league’s minimum pressure, and a scandal was born.

Here’s what plenty of physicists pointed out: a football inflated in a warm locker room loses pressure when it’s carried out into the cold and the rain. That’s the Ideal Gas Law, and any first-year physics student can walk you through it. You’ve seen it yourself on a winter morning, when the tire-pressure light comes on and then goes off once the tires warm up.

When Brady and Bill Belichick said they didn’t know why the balls measured low, they were probably telling the truth. The answer wasn’t in the locker room. It was on the thermometer.

Your case, their experts

What does this have to do with HR? At some point your company will be challenged over a termination, and an arbitrator or a jury will review your records and decide whether your actions were justified.

Meanwhile, the former employee’s attorney may hire an expert to interpret statistics about your workplace (demographics, discipline rates, who was treated how) to fit their narrative. That expert will have impressive credentials, speak the language of science and come across as credible. Your own expert may be appalled at how the data was bent, but that’s the reality of expert testimony. Each side has one, and the jury decides whose story sounds better.

The record beats the narrative

The best way to avoid having your fate decided by dueling experts is a contemporaneous record of what actually happened.

An employee’s work history (incidents, notes, attendance, training, write-ups) documented as it happened, with supporting files, gives the clearest picture of their actual performance. That performance is the real reason for your decision, and arbitrators and juries tend to give it real weight. The experts will still offer theories about trends in your workforce. But solid documentation of the critical incidents means you’re not betting everything on whose expert connects better with the room. Sometimes it keeps you out of the room altogether.

Most people don’t understand physics. Everyone understands a record.

What the NFL learned

In the end, the facts didn’t matter much. The league needed a verdict, and a famous quarterback was a convenient one. Brady served a four-game suspension at the start of the 2016 season, then led the Patriots back from 28–3 down in the third quarter to win Super Bowl LI in overtime. A Hollywood ending to a scandal that shouldn’t have been, and plenty of fans still believe he cheated.

Afterward, the league tightened how game balls are inspected, logged and handled before kickoff. If a process like that had been in place, and followed, the footballs would still have measured low at halftime. But there would have been a record of when they were tested, by whom and under what conditions, and it would have been obvious that the culprit was the weather, not the quarterback.

Keep a chain of custody for your decisions

Think about your employee files the way the league now thinks about its footballs: who recorded each entry, when it was recorded and what’s attached to it. That chain of custody is what makes a record believable. In HR PaperTrail, every entry on an employee’s timeline shows who recorded it and when, so the record can speak for itself long after memories have faded.