Playing footballs outdoors is against the rules? At this point, unless you are arguing that the guys deflated and then re-inflated the balls in the bathroom, the evidence the NFL collected actually shows the Patriots *couldn’t* have done what they were accused of. The margins are far too small.
And as for repeatability of this boy’s experiment, his results are in the opposite direction, and very likely well within his margin of error, for the few other test results we have. He’d need to explain that. Maybe he found a loophole in the laws of physics that only applies to footballs in his backyard. None of the pictures, nor the story itself provides sufficient description of his methodology or data/results to attempt to duplicate his results.
You may be correct. Nevertheless, it is the drive to obtain repeatable results which constitute research. I would guess that most scientific experiments are failures. Some failures are detected easily and some take decades or centuries to detect.