Oh, here we go, this makes perfect sense.
Jim McNally didn’t call himself The Deflator because he took air out of footballs, more probably than not at the behest of Tom Brady.
He called himself that because he’s fat.
That’s another of the arguments forwarded by the Patriots in their really long (nearly 20,000 words) refutation of the Ted Wells Report.
The Patriots explain that John Jastremski is a “slender guy,” and usually tried to work out and bulk up. McNally is described as “a big fellow,” and was trying to lose weight.
The Patriots contend investigators had possession of the “espn/deflator” text initially, but didn’t ask McNally about it in their first interview.
“Had they done so, they would have learned from either gentleman one of the ways they used the deflation/deflator term,” they wrote. “‘Deflate’ was a term they used to refer to losing weight.”
They cite specific texts including one which read “deflate and give somebody that jacket.”
“There was nothing complicated or sinister about it,” they wrote, before going through a blow-by-blow of previous texts between McNally and Jastremski which references beer pong and women whose names were “omitted out of respect to Mrs. Jastremski.”
The Patriots suggest that the “jocular texts” undermine Wells’ suggestion that deflator was a reference to anything wrong.
And frankly, that’s as thin as Jastremski apparently is.