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 Investigators hired by the NFL concluded Wednesday that it was “more probable than not” that New England Patriots personnel intentionally deflated footballs and that star quarterback Tom Brady was “at least generally aware.” 
 
 The investigators’ report on what came to be called Deflate-Gate faulted Jim McNally, a Patriots locker room attendant, and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant, for an apparent effort to let air out of game balls for the AFC championship game in January. 
 
 The report found less evidence linking Brady to tampering but found it was probable “that Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski.” 
 
 It quoted text messages between the two, months before the AFC title game, suggesting that Brady was asking for underinflated game balls, and that the quarterback expressed his displeasure when they were not to his liking. 
 
 It also quoted requests from McNally for shoes and signed footballs from Brady in exchange for deflating game balls. 
 
 Read the most revealing texts from the report 
 
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 Before the AFC championship game, McNally took two large bags of game balls, meant for both teams, out of the officials’ locker room and disappeared into a bathroom for a minute and 40 seconds, the report found. 
 
 Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would “consider what steps to take in light of the report, both with respect to possible disciplinary action and to any changes in protocols that are necessary to avoid future incidents of this type.” 
 
 The Patriots beat the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 for the AFC championship, and the Colts complained after the game that some balls were underinflated. Underinflated footballs are easier to catch and throw, particularly in difficult weather, and it was raining during the game. 
 
 Two weeks later, the Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. After a furor over the game balls, the commissioner asked Ted Wells, a prominent lawyer, to compile the report. It took more than four months and ran to more than 240 pages. 
 
 The Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, said he was still convinced that the team had done nothing wrong. 
 
 “To say we are disappointed in its findings, which do not include any incontrovertible or hard evidence of deliberate deflation of footballs at the AFC Championship game, would be a gross understatement,” he said in a statement. 
 
 In an interview with the investigators, Brady denied wrongdoing and said that he didn’t even know McNally’s name before the AFC title game. “We found these claims not plausible and contradicted by other evidence,” the report concluded. 
 
 It also found that Brady and Jastremski did not communicate by phone or text for six months — then communicated six times over the three days after suspicions were first raised about ball-tampering. 
 
 In May 2014, long before the season, McNally referred to himself as “the deflator,” according to texts reviewed by the investigators: 
 
 McNally: You workingJastremski: YupMcNally: Nice dude....jimmy needs some kicks....lets make a deal.....come on help the deflatorMcNally: Chill buddy im just (expletive) with you ....im not going to espn........yet 
 
 The report includes further salty text-message exchanges between McNally and Jastremski during the 2014 regular season, as they deal with Brady’s preferences for game balls. 
 
 After Brady complained about the inflation of footballs in a game in October, McNally wrote to Jastremski: “Tom sucks ... im going make that next ball a (expletive) balloon.” 
 
 Another exchange that same month went like this: 
 
 Jastremski: Can’t wait to give you your needle this week :)McNally: (Expletive) tom....make sure the pump is attached to the needle.....(expletive) watermelons comingJastremski: So angryMcNally: The only thing deflating sun..is his passing rating 
 
 In addition, the Colts alerted the league on the day before the AFC title game to concerns about air pressure in Patriots footballs, the report found. General Manager Ryan Grigson wrote: “All the Indianapolis Colts want is a completely level playing field.” 
 
 An attached message from the Colts’ equipment manager, said: 
 
 As far as the gameballs are concerned it is well known around the league that after the Patriots gameballs are checked by the officials and brought out for game usage the ballboys for the patriots will let out some air with a ball needle because their quarterback likes a smaller football so he can grip it better, it would be great if someone would be able to check the air in the game balls as the game goes on so that they don‟t get an illegal advantage. 
 
 An NFL official promised that one of his colleagues would speak to game officials about it. 
 
 At a press conference in January, Brady denied wrongdoing and said that he had never knowingly played with a football that did not meet league regulations. 
 
 “I would never do anything to break the rules,” he said. 
 
 The report cleared Bill Belichick, the head coach, and the Patriots front office in Deflate-Gate. It did fault the Patriots for refusing to make McNally available for a follow-up interview with investigators. The investigators said it was inconsistent with the team’s pledge of full cooperation. ||||| The Patriots have been busy inside Gillette Stadium, formulating a response to the Ted Wells report on Deflategate. 
 
 The Patriots escalated their high-stakes counterattack against the NFL and the Wells investigation of Tom Brady’s deflated footballs Thursday by launching a website to publish an exhaustive rebuttal portraying the inquiry’s findings as a Kafkaesque injustice. 
 
 The 20,000-word rebuttal includes a Nobel laureate’s rejection of the Wells Report’s scientific evidence and a stunning claim that team attendant Jim McNally referred to himself as “the deflator’’ because he was losing weight — not because he was removing air pressure from Brady’s footballs. 
 
 The website went up shortly before the NFL players’ union officially appealed Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly having “at least a general awareness’’ of the scandal and failing to fully cooperate with investigators. 
 
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 “The conclusions of the Wells Report are, at best, incomplete, incorrect, and lack context,’’ stated the rebuttal’s author, Daniel L. Goldberg, a Patriots lawyer. 
 
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 Two days after chief investigator Ted Wells took the unusual step of publicly defending his integrity, the Patriots accused him of ignoring inconsistencies “in logic and evidence’’ and of assigning nefarious motives to texted “attempts at humor and exaggeration.’’ The team contended that he had essentially manipulated the evidence to show that Brady preferred underinflated footballs and that McNally and equipment assistant John Jastremski probably cheated to satisfy Brady’s desires. 
 
 A spokeswoman for Wells said he had no comment on the rebuttal. 
 
 On their new website, wellsreportcontext.com, the Patriots acknowledged no wrongdoing by Brady, McNally, or Jastremski. Nor did they offer an explanation for why they indefinitely suspended McNally and Jastremski last week without pay, except to assert that Jastremski secretly gave McNally Patriots sneakers and gear without permission. 
 
 Goldberg’s rebuttal repeatedly characterized Wells’s interpretation of events and evidence as flawed or offered alternative explanations. One of Goldberg’s most jarring assertions was aimed at countering Wells’s interpretation of McNally describing himself as “the deflator.’’ 
 
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 To Wells, the statement was evidence of possible wrongdoing. To the Patriots, it was innocuous wordplay. 
 
 While Jastremski is thin and works out to bulk up, Goldberg stated, “Mr. McNally is a big fellow and had the opposite goal: to lose weight. ‘Deflate’ was a term they used to refer to losing weight.’’ 
 
 Goldberg cited two texts from McNally to Jastremski to support his conclusion. In one, McNally wrote, “deflate and give somebody that jacket.’’ 
 
 In the other, they were discussing women and a party (the Patriots redacted part of the exchange “out of respect to Mrs. Jastremski.’’). McNally, apparently referring to himself, texted Jastremski in part, “Jimmy needs some kicks . . . lets make a deal . . . come on help the deflator.’’ 
 
 Several minutes later, after receiving no reply, McNally wrote, “Chill buddy im just [messing] with you . . . im not going to espn . . . yet.’’ 
 
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 Wells described the exchange as compelling evidence that McNally was threatening to disclose the alleged football deflation scheme to the media. 
 
 To the contrary, Goldberg wrote, McNally was mocking Jastremski’s concern that his boss would discover he had secretly been giving McNally sneakers and other Patriots property. It was “Mr. McNally’s way of saying, in substance: ‘Hey, don’t worry about whether giving me those sneakers will get you in trouble — I’ll never tell,’ ’’ Goldberg asserted. 
 
 In his voluminous rebuttal, Goldberg stated unequivocally that no evidence has surfaced of Brady saying he prefers his footballs deflated below the league’s minimum pressure standard of 12.5 pounds per square inch. Witness testimony appears to confirm that every time the topic arose, Brady made clear he wanted the footballs inflated to the lowest permissible level. 
 
 Goldberg also provides an alternative explanation for Brady engaging in six phone calls for nearly 55 minutes with Jastremski over three days, beginning at 7:26 the morning after news of the purported scandal broke in the hours after the AFC Championship game. 
 
 Wells depicted the purpose of the calls as damage control. Not so, according to Goldberg, who asserted Brady reached out to Jastremski because he apparently anticipated a “media frenzy’’ about the deflated balls and was concerned for a co-worker who lacked experience dealing with the media. 
 
 “Mr. Brady’s reaching out to Mr. Jastremski to see how he was holding up in these circumstances is not only understandable, but commendable,’’ Goldberg wrote. 
 
 He said the phone calls were “totally consistent with complete innocence.’’ 
 
 Wells, in defending his report to the media Tuesday, described a text exchange between McNally and Jastremski that convinced him “in the bottom of my heart’’ that they were implicating Brady in the alleged deflation conspiracy. 
 
 McNally, unhappy that Brady had complained about his footballs being overinflated in a game against the New York Jets, texted to Jastremski: “Tom sucks . . . im going make that next ball a [expletive] balloon.’’ 
 
 Jastremski replied, “Talked to him last night. He actually brought you up and said you must have a lot of stress trying to get them done.’’ 
 
 Wells described the exchange as direct evidence that “two participants in the scheme’’ were helping Brady. 
 
 Wrong, according to Goldberg, who asserted the “Tom’’ in question was not Brady but a friend of Jastremski’s. He said the conversation involved “McNally’s stress relating to reselling family tickets’’ to Patriots games. 
 
 Goldberg said the Patriots made Jastremski’s friend, Tom, available for a phone interview with Wells’s team. But “the investigators, rather than take further steps to check out this information, simply chose to disbelieve input that did not square with their conclusions,’’ Goldberg wrote. 
 
 He also took issue with Wells’s complaint that the Patriots refused to make McNally available for a final interview with investigators. Wells said the interview was crucial because he had discovered McNally’s “deflator’’ texts after his first conversation with McNally and needed to confront him about them. 
 
 Wells has cited the refusal to make McNally available again as evidence of the Patriots’ failure to cooperate. 
 
 Goldberg countered that Wells received the “deflator’’ texts before his first interview with McNally but overlooked them. When Wells sought the second interview, Goldberg said, the Patriots offered alternatives to an in-person interview to provide the information Wells needed. 
 
 “There was no follow-up from investigators,’’ Goldberg wrote. “It now appears that the Patriots are being severely punished because the Wells investigative team apparently overlooked materials they had in their possession long before their interview with Mr. McNally.’’ 
 
 Goldberg suggested Wells also ignored scientific evidence that atmospheric pressure may have accounted for Brady’s underinflated footballs when the Patriots played the Indianapolis Colts Jan. 18 in the AFC Championship game. 
 
 As part of a detailed analysis that raised questions not only about which gauges the officials used to measure the Patriots footballs but the league’s apparent lax attention to the inflation levels of the Colts’ balls, Goldberg cited the conclusions of Roderick MacKinnon, a 2003 Nobel Prize recipient in chemistry, that Wells’s scientific findings were “incorrect.’’ 
 
 The new Patriots website initially stated MacKinnon offered them his expertise and had no personal relationship with the team. 
 
 Several hours later, after reports of a possible conflict of interest arose, the Patriots updated the site to say they are a passive investor in MacKinnon’s biotechnology company, Flex Pharma. 
 
 The team was fined $1 million and docked two draft picks — a first-rounder in 2016 and fourth-rounder in 2017. 
 
 Bob Hohler can be reached at robert.hohler@globe.com ||||| The NFL took deflate-gate very seriously, hammering the New England Patriots with unheard of punishment in the matter of deflated footballs. 
 
 The league announced Monday that quarterback Tom Brady was suspended four games, the team was fined $1 million and will lose its 2016 first-round draft pick and a fourth-round pick in 2017. The league has been considering punishment since the release of investigator Ted Wells' report on Thursday. 
 
 That's a huge punishment considering there was no evidence Brady was directly involved and the Wells Report said Patriots ownership and coach Bill Belichick weren't involved. The league said the punishment was for violating playing rules and not cooperating fully in the investigation. 
 
 Brady plans to appeal the decision. His agent, Don Yee, said in a statement, via Fox Sports' Mike Garafolo: "The discipline is ridiculous and has no legitimate basis. In my opinion, this outcome was pre-determined; there was no fairness in the Wells investigation whatsoever. ... 
 
 "The NFL has a well-documented history of making poor disciplinary decisions that often are overturned when truly independent and neutral judges or arbitrators preside, and a former federal judge has found the commissioner has abused his discretion in the past, so this outcome does not surprise me." 
 
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 In the release, the NFL said Patriots employees John Jastremski and James McNally have been indefinitely suspended without pay by the club, effective May 6. They aren't allowed to be reinstated without the NFL's permission. If they are reinstated, the NFL said "Jastremski is prohibited from having any role in the preparation, supervision, or handling of footballs to be used in NFL games during the 2015 season. McNally is barred from serving as a locker room attendant for the game officials, or having any involvement with the preparation, supervision, or handling of footballs or any other equipment on game day." 
 
 
 
 In Wells' report, it states "it is more probable than not that Tom Brady (the quarterback for the Patriots) was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski involving the release of air from Patriots game balls." 
 
 Jim McNally is the officials locker room attendant who took the game balls to the field, and stopped in a locked side bathroom for a minute and 40 seconds with the balls inside. Jastremski is the Patriots' assistant equipment man who prepared the game balls. The two texted about Brady's preference over the air pressure. Brady has said his preference was to have it at the low end of the rule, which is 12.5 psi. 
 
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 The issue came about after the AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts, who told the league the day before the game that they had concerns about the air pressure in the Patriots' game balls, intercepted a Brady pass in the first half and examined it on the sideline. They told the league, and league officials re-inspected the game balls at halftime and found they were under the minimum allowed by league rules. 
 
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 Brady denied any wrongdoing in January, during a long news conference. During it, he said, "I have no knowledge of anything." A little more than a week later at the Super Bowl, he had one of the great performances of all time, bringing the Patriots back in a nearly-perfect fourth quarter to knock off the Seattle Seahawks. It was his fourth Super Bowl title. He was named Super Bowl MVP. 
 
 The issue with punishing Brady is it is all based on conjecture. There's not even really circumstantial evidence; there's really no evidence of Brady's direct participation in any scheme put forth in Wells' report. The report implicates Brady basically because it says he had to have known, not because they had any proof that he did know or stated to either McNally or Jastremski that he wanted balls deflated after inspection. The report simply doesn't find him guilty. 
 
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 NFL vice president of football operations Troy Vincent sent a heavy-handed letter to Brady. 
 
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– Tom Brady appealed his four-game suspension over under-inflated footballs with about an hour to spare before today's 5pm deadline, reports AP. The NFL Players Association filed the paperwork on his behalf. The Patriots, meanwhile, issued a detailed rebuttal to the league report on the scandal, saying its conclusions are "at best, incomplete, incorrect and lack context." One notable part: Referring to texts between team employees Jim McNally and John Jastremski, the Patriots say there's no proof they were talking about deflating footballs, reports the Boston Globe. Instead, McNally's "deflator" nickname referred to weight loss, says the team: "Mr. Jastremski would sometimes work out and bulk up—he is a slender guy and his goal was to get to 200 pounds. Mr. McNally is a big fellow and had the opposite goal: to lose weight. 'Deflate' was a term they used to refer to losing weight."