Has anyone checked the calibration record of the gauge done prior to the game?
Who knows if they even use one? The fact that footballs being under inflated has never even been an accusation or issue or any type of a “deal” before, it does seem completely plausible that teams fill up the footballs by feel according to how their QB likes them, the refs do a quick check by hand, and either approve them or say they need more air, and that’s it. If the Patriots had the nerve to mess with the air pressure of the footballs after the refs approved them, then they absolutely deserve anything coming to them. But if they gave them to the refs that way, and they were determined to be fine because they felt close enough, because no one really cares about precise psi levels in a ball that teams are allowed to otherwise condition, scuff and prep however they want.
It’s probably been mentioned, but USC got in trouble a few years ago for using underinflated footballs. In the NFL, I know the refs check the balls prior to kickoff, but I don’t know their method. Do they do it by just feel? A Colts player who intercepted the pass could apparently feel the difference, I suspect a ref could, too.
I’m not surprised the Pats tried to get away with something underhanded. Belichick thinks he’s invincible.
I’m not quite off the ledge with you yet, but getting there. Meanwhile, this guy is too dumb to understand how pressure gauges work, but I’m sure he’s good at physics:
A few salient points, nonetheless:
[ol]
[li]The beatdown laid on Indy far exceeds anything you can do with underfull balls.[/li][li]Intentional tampering with the game balls hasn’t been proven[/li][li]Intentional tampering with the game balls may never be proven, even if that’s what really happened[/li][li]Even if the worst comes to pass for NE, they won’t forfeit. So they’re going to the Super Bowl regardless[/li][/ol]And I say this as a Seahawks fan who thinks Seattle would have an easier time against the Colts.
An old adage in sports; one that’s always bothered the law-and-order side of my personality, but seems to be true anyway: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.”
It is my understanding that at halftime the ball pressure is checked again.
So, they go into the third quarter with properly inflated balls and proceed to utterly wreck the Colts in an incredibly lopsided quarter.
Playing with properly inflated balls made them perform better.
The under-inflated ball was intercepted.
Are we really sure we can write off the Patriots as being nothing but cheaters due to balls being under-inflated by approximately the amount they would be if they were inflated properly in warm temperatures and then moved outside?
Herro? Herro prease? Someone please tell me why the Patriots stomped an even bloodier mudhole in the Colts after the balls were checked and inspected by the officials?
A) If someone did this deliberately, I am disgusted, fine them, throw them out of the NFL, I don’t care. But,
B) The Patriots utterly wrecked the Colts with properly inflated balls. Worse, even.
C) Temperature change = pressure change.
D) I’m with everyone who says why the fuck would the Patriots get to inflate their own balls in the first fricking place!??! GOD EFFING DAMMIT
THERE IS ZERO… ZERO doubt in my mind that the Patriots utterly destroy the Colts no matter how inflated or not inflated the balls are. But none of that matters. Now I have to sit here and listen to the sour grapes brigade get to wipe everything clean and say, well, the Pats probably deflated all the balls on purpose and nothing they do is legit and blah blah blah, and it’s a legitimate point because the balls are under-inflated according to the rulebook.
My team doesn’t get to win legitimately, videotapes that every team in the NFL did eight years ago wipe out everything they did seven years ago, and every year since. Every fricking year, day in, and day out, cheatriots, cheatriots, cheatriots. Whiny little pissants who utterly ignore steroid abuse and paid hit jobs complaining about the miraculous videotaping that explains 7 further years of epic carnage. Just wipes it all clean, nothing they do is legit.
Now, balls which can be underinflated with absolutely no tampering whatsoever because of simple physics, plus the fact that they were inflated by the Patriots?
Who the fuck comes up with such a rule? THAT is bullshit. It gives the APPEARANCE of impropriety, and that’s all it takes.
That’s all some fans need.
Doesn’t matter the situation was immediately rectified, and the rest of the game you have balls up to league standard, and the result of that was an even harder beatdown on the Colts.
None of that matters.
All that matters is the appearance of impropriety, and any Patriot within 100 square miles of that appearance.
Disgusted by the entire thing. Disgusted the teams inflate their own balls, disgusted that people think it made any difference to the outcome, disgusted by the fans who latch on like mewling kittens wanting mama cat’s milk, any time they get a chance to say, well, the Patriots won the game, but I have an excuse this week why they won.
Save your excuses. This is the same league where we have players who use performance enhancing drugs, and this is the same league where we pay players to injure opposing players, and none of that wipes out any wins from any other team.
But you get balls that shrink in cold weather, and that gives the excuse-based fans of football all the evidence they need to play hypothetical football. And in the hypothetical football league, the Patriots never win, because in hypothetical football, some other team won, because if those footballs had been inflated by two more pounds, the Colts wouldn’t have been utterly outplayed and outcoached on every stage of the game, including after halftime, including after the officals were ensuring that the balls were properly inflated. If, if, if.
Now, the Pats go into the Superbowl, and it doesn’t matter if they win. Hypothetical football fans know their team is the one that actually won the Superbowl, and that the Patriots cheat even when they play by the rules. Like when they utterly outcoached the Ravens. Sure, it was all legal, but it was still cheating.
Cheaty cheaty cheat cheat cheat. It must be nice to have so many excuses for your team’s suckage. I remember when I cheered for the Patriots back when they never made the playoffs, there were no excuses for why they lost. I knew why they lost- it’s because they were outplayed and outcoached.
But now we have the national-excuse-league. I don’t think I could be a fan if the only reason why I watch is because I get to make excuses for why my team didn’t win this week. Why my coach didn’t understand the rulebook, and couldn’t keep his sorry ass off the field where he has no business being. Why I can dive at my opponent’s knees and try to hurt a player because I’ve got nothing left to do but spite-injure someone on a better team, to make up for the fact that my team got beat. Why if I’m found guilty of performance enhancing drugs or being paid to injure the opposing team, my team isn’t a bunch of cheating lying reprehensible scumbags, but if the Patriots have under-inflated balls, everything they’ve ever done is gone. Wiped clean. Because I have that security blanket of excuses.
Hey, I got to complain for seven years about videotaping that somehow explained away AFC championships and winning records year after year after the fact, and lord over the fact that the Pats didn’t win a super bowl afterwards, because that makes perfect, sane, rational, logical sense. You put two and two together on that one, guys.
I hope the Patriots start losing, and losing hard. I hope their suckage someday approaches or equals the absolute utter suckage of some of the other teams in this league. I can’t wait until the Patriots go on a 10 game losing streak, so I can hear the fans out there come up with a different explanation for why their team sucks so bad.
Remove the Patriots from the equation entirely. I wonder if it will still be their fault.
A) Even if it’s Belichick?
B) I’m sure could have wrecked the Colts with properly inflated balls. But they didn’t.
C) Not that much. I ran the calcs with the game-time temperatures upthread. To cause a pressure drop from 12.5 to 10.5 psi, you’d need a temperature change of 82 °F. Didn’t happen.
D) That’s the rule.
I’ve been defending Belichick, but I’m done with it now. At this point, I’d be fine with the league suspending him indefinitely, starting tomorrow. Yeah, that means he’d miss the Super Bowl. Oh well. He was already fined $500,000 for cheating, and that didn’t stop him from doing it again. Players who are repeat offenders get suspended. Coaches? I guess we’ll find out.
The players’ union is going to be watching the league like a hawk on this, too. There’s a strong feeling in the union that Goodell is harder on players than on owners, and here’s his chance to shake that.
Colts fan here. We got our asses handed to us on a platter, and that would have happened whether the balls were inflated properly or not. Period. I haven’t heard anyone saying that the Colts would have won if it weren’t for this. We got beat for plenty of good reasons, which is our own damn fault.
However, if the Patriots cheated (and it wouldn’t be the first time), then they should be penalized accordingly. If any other team had done the same thing, I would say the same thing.
Sorry…did you account for the fact that the footballs are being measured in the presence of existing atmospheric pressure, rather than in a vacuum?
If the inflation pressure is so important then it is astonishing that the NFL has not implemented some sort of SOP on football inflation. With documentation that the inflation was done according to SoP with supervision from a representative of the official crew.
This is not 7th grade football. This is NFL, the biggest and most powerful sports organization in the USA, if not the world.
There already is. All the balls are checked and marked pre-game. What happened here was that they were tampered with after that.
They do. It must be inflated to 12.5 to 13.5 psi.
Rule Book Warning .pdf.
The NFL places a certain amount of trust and faith in teams to abide by the rules and to be good sportsmen during the games. They don’t check every single thing on every single play. They have a rule, but they don’t, and I didn’t think it necessary to, investigate every single possible way for a team to cheat the rules.
Unfortunately, they don’t account for the Patriots.
Of course the Pats would have destroyed the Colts regardless of the football’s PSI. That is not at all the point. They tried to tilt the playing field in their favor by illegal means and they should pay a price for that. Who deflated the balls and on whose orders has not been and probably never will be proven. But the Belichick has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to cheating.
You know, I didn’t - good catch.
Accounting for that, I’m still coming up short unless:
[ol]
[li]The balls were initially checked indoors (assuming 68 °F indoor temperature), AND[/li][li]The final check was done outdoors in freezing temperatures.[/li][/ol]
I’d be surprised if that was the path the league took, but I’ll hold off on calling for Belichick’s suspension until there’s more detail available about the testing process.
The footballs are checked in the officials’ locker room, and the first measurement happened at halftime, so I think it’s workable - and I have no expectation that the NFL ever thought about temperature differentials.
My guess right now is that the Patriots have thought about it, and all those footballs measured in before the game at exactly 12.5. That would fall into the classic Belichick thinking that as long as it’s not technically cheating, it must be okay.
What’s especially stupid is that they didn’t have to cheat.
I’m a blue-and-green=blooded Seahawks fan, but I LIKE the Pats. I’m disappointed that this will over-shadow an awesome match-up, and that we’ll all have to listen to sports media go on and on and on and on about it rather than the game.
And again, lest anyone forget:
Aaron Rodgers Likes To Tamper With Footballs, Too
There is zero credibility to this being the Patriots cheating. This isn’t. This story is about the Patriots (once again, same deal as spygate) doing what everyone else does. But the butthurt whiners don’t like the Patriots, so WHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!
Here is what bothers me about the Patriots situation. In order to believe that this was all an accident and that there was no intentional cheating, I would have to believe that none of the Patriots players who were in repeated contact with the under inflated balls noticed that they were not properly inflated. That’s several players (QB, Center, Receivers, Running Back). Why didn’t any of these players notice that the balls were under inflated? Is it that the difference is not noticeable?
I have a problem with that since there was a Colt player who identified the ball as under inflated upon touching it once (interception), which implies that the lack of inflation was clearly noticeable to anyone who touched it.
The mitigating factor is that the referees didn’t notice that the balls were under inflated either, and they presumably were touching the under inflated balls multiple times as well.
So was Brady et al. complicit in knowing that the balls were under inflated and not saying anything?
If there is a guy who was told to deflate the footballs, he should be a very rich man right now.
If not, what is to not stop him from going to the league? Loyalty?
Yeah, at least one ref would be touching the football after every single play. How did they not notice?