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CHRISTOPHER L. GASPER

Patriots will not get exonerated at this Super Bowl

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wouldn’t give an inch when it came to Deflategate during his state of the league address on Friday. Mike Lawrie/Getty Images

This has not been a great Super Bowl week for paranoid Patriotologists. Super Bowl 50 feels like a Patriots Trolling Rally with the double-standard conduct of the NFL and the pigskin vox populi.

Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning can win his second Super Bowl in Tom Brady’s backyard and has skated on the HGH allegation reported by Al Jazeera in December, in stark contrast to the media maelstrom Brady and the Patriots endured under Deflategate suspicion at Super Bowl XLIX.

In his State of the League address Friday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell completely dodged why the NFL isn’t releasing those pesky PSI numbers the league recorded this season in select games to buttress the all-important integrity of the game, air pressure version. Those are numbers Patriots fans believe could exonerate the team.

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There is a better chance of the Krafts posting Bill Belichick’s contract on Facebook than the NFL releasing the raw data from its PSI checkups this season. Sorry.

Goodell said the league only recorded the PSI data as a deterrent, not an attempt to find out if the Ideal Gas Law defense is valid or a scientifically-convenient alibi. He announced there were no violations discovered this year.

Great, the league was conducting the equivalent of bed checks and no one missed curfew. But was there any deflation detected during games? If so how much?

The PSI policy can’t be a deterrent if you can’t prove a ball has slipped below the approved PSI level due to intentional tampering, not atmospheric conditions. It can’t be a deterrent when you can’t show that you can determine unequivocally what constitutes a violation of the rule.

It’s just window dressing.

The raw numbers matter. For a commissioner who prioritizes the integrity of the game, isn’t it worth finding out if the integrity of the NFL’s scientific case in its air pressure inquest is intact?

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Without some context from the 2015 numbers, Patriots fans are going to feel NFL stands for Numbers Fudged League.

This is the same league that never corrected the ESPN report that 11 of the Patriots 12 footballs in the last year’s AFC Championship game were two PSI below the 12.5 limit. This is the same commissioner who pledged more transparency in the wake of the Ray Rice scandal in 2014.

Goodell stuck to the script he unveiled on Tuesday on “The Rich Eisen Show” when asked about the PSI data the league collected.

He never directly answered a question about whether any balls were found to have slipped under the 12.5 PSI limit this season.

“It was data that was collected just to see if there was a violation,” said Goodell. “Our people never found a violation. There was never an accusation of a violation by any other club. So, we’re comfortable that this policy, this rule is followed by our clubs. We do this across the board in our game operations. There are many areas of our game operations that requires that type of thing.

“Second of all, we did a great deal of research and scientific analysis last year. That was a part of the appeal hearing. There was Ted Wells’s report where he went and got independent people to study this type of issue, so the intent of what we were doing was not a research project. It was to make sure that our policies were followed, just as we do in other areas of our game operations.”

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It was the type of skull-imploding palaver that usually comes from Fort Foxborough during a Bill Belichick press conference that doesn’t contain the words “Mona Lisa Vito.”

The NSA could learn a thing from the NFL about protecting potentially damaging data.

The only logical conclusion to draw from the NFL’s refusal to release the numbers to at least the member clubs is that it would hurt the NFL’s cause.

It’s hard to fathom that if the readings supported the NFL’s case they wouldn’t want them out before their March 3 appeal hearing on the vacation of Brady’s four-game suspension.

Part of the rationale Goodell gave in his written decision upholding Brady’s four-game suspension after an NFL appeal hearing was that Brady’s alleged participation in a scheme to deflate footballs was akin to using performance-enhancing drugs.

But no one seems as fixated on or indignant about an iconic quarterback being accused of using PEDs.

While Deflategate is still a hot topic, the Manning HGH allegation story has been muffled compared to last year’s Super Bowl scandal frenzy.

In fairness, the Patriots brought some of that on when they arrived in Arizona for Super Bowl XLIX and basically declared war on the league, demanding an apology.

Manning has been more conciliatory, saying he welcomed the NFL’s investigation.

Still, he basically only had to answer questions about the HGH allegations on Monday, the first day of media access. Then he was asked about retiring and his high school coach.

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The comments of Carolina quarterback Cam Newton on race and the possibility this is Manning’s final game have been much bigger story lines than the possibility he used performance-enhancing drugs back in 2011.

Manning was not the only NFL athlete implicated by the Al Jazeera documentary, which also linked baseball players Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman to PEDs.

Goodell said the league was taking the allegation “very seriously.”

“When we find out the facts we’ll share them as we have in the past,” said Goodell. “We want to make sure that we are transparent. We do not have an independent investigation going on at this point other than working with the other leagues and with [the US Anti-Doping Agency]. If we feel that’s necessary at some point we may get that. At this point we don’t.”

There will be no Rolling Rally this year, but you can cue the Rolling Stones; this is the no satisfaction Super Bowl for the Patriots.


Christopher L. Gasper is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cgasper@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @cgasper.