NFL: Underinflated Balls?

The Game Room
241

Another so called expert used Kelvin temps, but the Fahrenheit readings to do his calculation and forgot to allow the 14.7 psi base pressure, as well. Somehow, he got a similar result.

I arrived independently at the same conclusion. My thinking about this is that the league has never set rigorous procedures for inflating and measuring pressure in balls. They leave it to the refs to decide if the balls are okay or not. Do they even say the same ref, using the same measurement device has to check all the balls to be used in the game? Do they say that the balls will be turned over, immediately upon being ‘qualified’ to a league official in charge of the balls (and whatever else) who will put them into play as needed? Apparently not. Starting with the QB’s being allowed to select the balls they will use is interesting and subject to some problems, as well.

Overall, the matter doesn’t amount to much, but the league needs to get some real regulations in place before next training camp.

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Why? Even if the balls were under-inflated, it had no effect on the outcome of the game and, now, has been way too over-analyzed. While I would certainly love it if teams were self-regulating and weren’t so slimy as to take advantage of the rules for a miniscule benefit, I’m more concerned about the game turning into a hyper-technical festering hole of legal parsing and technical chicanery. There are certain teams that are always going to be douchey, teams that don’t care about sportsmanship and prefer to eke out every tiny advantage, but I’d rather the NFL focus on limiting brain damage, rolling back the hefty advantage to offenses, and not having wife and children beaters employed than whether or not some douchbag wants to under-inflate the balls.

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  1. Do you agree or disagree that a 12.5 psi football at 70 degrees would become an 11.5 psi football after 3 hours in 45 degree temperature? If you disagree, can you explain why?

  2. do you agree or disagree that if the patriots footballs were measured to be 11.5 at halftime, the most “parsimonious explanation” would be the fact that a 12.5 football becomes an 11.5 psi football after 3 hours in 45 degree temperature? If you disagree again, then why?

  1. Would you agree or disagree that IF the Patriots have been deflating footballs manually after inspection, theres no reason they they would start doing that in 2007- That QBs freedom to condition their footballs to their own preference before inspection has no bearing in the ability to deflate them after inspection? If you disagree, why?

  2. Would you agree or disagree that IF the condition of the football itself were the primary reason for the lack of the Patriots fumbles since 2007 (pure speculation, but IF it were true) , and seeing that, as you have pointed out, their fumble success coincides precisely with Brady’s legal ability to condition footballs pregame to his preference, that a plausible explanation could be the legal special conditioning process itself, that the Patriots do to the ball- since it’s a known fact that the special conditioning started at the same time the fumble success started, and there’s no reason to assume that post-inspection deflation, if it were happening, would have started then too, since pre-inspection conditioning has no bearing on someone’s ability to deflate the ball after inspection? If you disagree, then again, please explain why?

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I don’t know. I’ve seen a bunch of people offering a bunch of calculations. I’ve seen convincing looking demonstrations for why the deflation should be as high as 1.8 to 2.0 psi. I believe I’ve seen you endorsing such here; correct me if I’m wrong. Now that you have Mike Florio saying the psi for the balls was “closer to 1,” which you somehow truncate to 1, what of all the analyses that said 1.8 to 2.0 was the magic number?

Also, we have Mortensen’s report of 11 balls being 2 psi low. We have Florio’s report of being “closer to 1.” Why is Florio correct and Mortensen not?

Even in your best scenario, all balls start at 12.5 psi. At halftime, you have 1 ball that is 10.5 psi, 1 ball that is 12.5 psi, and 10 balls that are 11.5 psi. The scientific explanation is constant across balls, so it can’t account for three different values. You need two other mechanisms acting to match the facts. Not only that, but you have to account for the apparent constant effects across all the other balls - Colts, backup, and kicking balls.

My explanation needs just one mechanism. Do you know what “parsimonious” means?

In addition, my explanation has been invariant across all new observations - new bits of data. You’ve considered saunas, Charmin squeezing by the refs, temperature effects (to get to near 2 psi and now just 1 psi), and presuming the video evidence is as reported, a temporary and innocent trip to the men’s room.

I still have only needed the one mechanism.

Of course I disagree. The prior practice was for the home team to supply new balls for everyone. There was presumably access to manipulate balls in only half the games, and no incentive since everyone was using the same pool of balls. :confused:

Sure. There could be some other thing that the Patriots were doing, other than messing with balls post-inspection, that affects grip but cannot be detected upon inspection.

A simpler and more consistent explanation that requires only one mechanism is that they always just deflate balls after they pass inspection.

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FWIW. Anyone know what the air source was for filling the balls? When I use a hand pump or small compressor on bike tires the air is HOT - not room temperature.

246

PFT: It was a bathroom. He was in there for 90 seconds

And the video was turned over by the Pats early in the investigation. So Belichick, Brady, and Kraft have known about it while making their categorical denials.

Would it be possible for him to remove 12 balls from the bag, deflate them all, put them back in the bag, and exit the bathroom in 90 seconds? It sounds a bit short to me. It does, however, sound about like the right interval of time for somebody to, you know, use the toilet. Which would seem to be an obvious course of action for somebody about to stand on a sideline for 2 hours.

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Yeah the language of the leak (heh) from the NFL making it sound like they had come up with some incriminating video, combined with it coming out while the Patriots were flying to Arizona and it is no wonder that Kraft was so pissed at his presser. Also why he is demanding that the NFL “definitively determine that our organization tampered with the air pressure in the footballs” and not just say, well something could have happened in those 90 seconds.

Finally, there are local radio reports this morning that the balls went into the refs below 12.5 and were not pumped up by the refs. No link, could be crap, just something to add to your conspiracy theories.

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I hear this exact same line from creationists and religious zealots all the time. Despite all the new theories, all the possible explanations things based off of new previously unknown data, they always say they only need one mechanism.

You know more “mechanisms” actually strengthens the argument against you. If I give you 3 plausible scenarios, that doesn’t mean there’s a scenario with a 3 mechanisms needed vs. your 1. It means I have three 1 mechanism scenarios to your 1.

And it doesn’t matter if 1 or more of the scenarios are ruled out as new information comes in. Of course some are going to be ruled out, it can’t be all of them

Oh, I didn’t know that was off the table? But you gave it a silly name, so that means it couldn’t be true

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No snark intended here: I don’t doubt there are teams that by your standards, are less douchey than others. I know you consider the Patriots one of the douchey teams, which is fine. But for clarification can you list the teams that you feel are not douchey?

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Ha! This is hilarious. First, you need not necessarily agree with Occam’s Razor, but you should at least understand it.

Secondly, you need to account for 3 different values from a single starting point. One model, three mechanisms. Not three different hypothetical models. Tell me, starting with 12.5 psi, how does one ball end up at 10.5, one at 12.5 and ten at 11.5?

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Who says they definitely all started at 12.5?

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I’m guessing this is going to turn into you simply saying “yeah, well that team you mentioned had a guy who used PED’s, so there!” or “yeah, but that team has that one guy who is a jerk, so that somehow means that Patriots are better!” or “yeah, that team was warned by the NFL to not warm up balls, so Patriots something, something, something”.

Is there an actual point to your question, besides that of course? I think we can agree that the teams that have actually been disciplined by the NFL for breaking the rules, like the Patriots and the Saints, can safely be criticized without having their fans shout “yeah, but every team does something wrong, so there!”

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Just sayin.

254

Completely agree.

Why not remove the regulation about inflation levels altogether?

After all, the inflation level of the ball primarily affects the offense, and the league has been very clear over recent years that promoting offense and hamstringing defense is one of its priorities. Why not just let every team inflate its own balls to a level that it finds most beneficial to its offense?

If one quarterback prefers to throw a flapping piece of pigskin with almost no air at all in it, then let him do it. And if another quarterback prefers to throw a ball that’s inflated almost to the point of explosion, then go right ahead. There are advantages and disadvantages to overinflated and underinflated balls, and all teams will choose the level of inflation that they believe gives them the best chance of scoring.

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Sorry, the weather’s not going to change the balls that much as others have pointed out. I stand by my criticism. Even if they did everything by the book, as soon as they realized they had an advantage, or that the equipment was faulty, they should have alerted the refs. Ignorance is no excuse in this case, they cannot and should not assume that everyone knew or everyone was fine with the balls being deflated. If not malicious tampering, then they should be punished for negligence.

I know the NFL’s not going to do anything, but as far as the integrity of the game is concerned, because this is the last match of the season, ideally they should either move back the Superbowl until the issue is resolved and the Pats appropriately punished, or finish the investigation before the Superbowl and punish the Patriots during that game, maybe by suspending Brady and/or Bellichick for it. But that’s if they care about fairness. We know they care more about money. Barring those drastic measures, they should, at the very least, issue a punishment that impacts the Pats for Sunday’s game

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IF we assume that in fact one ball was 12.5psi, ten were 11.5psi and one was 10.5psi, then, unless the balls were indeed warmed up before being measured as kidchameleon suggested (which there doesn’t seem to be enough time for if the sequence of events is as described) then the only balls we need to account for are the 12.5psi and the 10.5 psi.

A lot of calculations have been floated around here and elsewhere, but a lot of them have either been manipulated to make the numbers come out (the temperature would have to have been considerably lower than it was to account for a 2psi drop) or based on a simple mistake (using gauge pressure instead of absolute pressure as Tyson was apparently doing). Using the actual gametime temperature of 51F (the temperature would have dropped a little during the first half, but I’m not worrying about that) and a presumed room temperature of 70F, the pressure in the ball would drop by about 1psi.

There’s no getting around this. Pressure and temperature are exactly linearly related. An x% drop in temperature will result in an x% drop in pressure. 70F is 294.3K. 51f is 283.7. That’s about a 3.4% drop. A ball at 12psi gauge pressure is at 27.2psi absolute (12.5psi gauge plus atmospheric pressure of 14.7psi). 3.4% of 27.2 is .92.

Now, if you can suggest a reason, or your own calculations, to suggest why this isn’t the case, please have at it. Otherwise, I see no way that balls inflated to 12.5 psi at 70F will not be at 11.5psi (or 11.6) after being in 50 degree weather for an hour and a half.

You can talk about three different mechanisms all you want. You can’t get around physics.

All of this assumes, of course, that the report that the 10 balls were actually about 1 pound under. We continue to not really know much.

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Hentor - my own take, as an admitted Patriots fan, is that I think the Pats turn in under inflated balls every week - or if the weather conditions demand it, or whatever mood strikes them. If the refs don’t notice, great, and if they do, they play with what the refs inflate it to. The reverse of what Aaron Rodgers said the Packers do because he likes the ball over-inflated. They might even go so far as to inflate one ball to 12.5 PSI and put it on top of the bag on the off chance the ref measures one ball, and approves the rest untested based on human nature. I base this theory on:

  1. The official NFL statement, not a leak, says that balls were inspected and approved before the game, but tested at half-time and after the game. Very interesting choice of words for a statement undoubtedly vetted by lawyers and PR flacks. Also while they have reported the PSI at the half and post-game, no PSI was given for the balls pre-game. So, does anyone know what the PSI of the ref approved balls pre-game was? Or, were the balls merely inspected pre-game?

  2. We all know that Belichick likes to find the gray area of the rules and ride it like Secretariat, so let us see what the rules say:

“Each team will make 12 primary balls available for testing by the Referee two hours and 15 minutes prior to the starting time of the game to meet League requirements.”

Note, does not say balls must be presented meeting League requirements. In fact one could claim that as written it is part of the official’s job to put the ball into proper game condition. Presenting balls out of specs is not a violation.

Also from the rules:
“The Referee shall be the sole judge as to whether all balls offered for play comply with these specifications. A pump is to be furnished by the home club”

Why would a pump be provided to the refs if not for changing the PSI of any ball not found to be meeting the specs before the game?

http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/rulebook/pdfs/5_2013_Ball.pdf

So, now let us look at what Belichick said on Saturday:

" I believe now 100 percent that I have personally, and we as an organization, have absolutely followed every rule to the letter."

"When the footballs are delivered to the officials locker room, the officials were asked to inflate them to 12.5 PSI. What exactly they did, I don’t know. "

And that is the team’s defense. As stated in the rules, we presented our balls to the officials at the prescribed time and gave them a pump. It is their job to approve them for play. Some balls were under-inflated? Talk to the officials, that is their responsibility.

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/01/25/transcript-of-bill-belichicks-january-24-press-conference/

  1. Bob Kraft can demand that the NFL produce evidence that his team tampered with approved balls without fear, because he knows there isn’t any. Because that isn’t the angle Belichick works.

So, are the Patriots/Belichick sneaky, duplicitous bastards? Well sure, we already know that. But did they cheat? Not by my theory. The current Patriots slogan is “Do Your Job” and a portion of their success over the past 15 years is based on the fact that other teams, and in this case the officials, don’t do their job.

I realize that this theory won’t change your opinion of the team in any way, but doesn’t it make a hell of a lot more sense then counting on some ball guy getting the balls just right in 90 seconds in the bathroom? Or while sneaking his hand under a towel on the sidelines? Also, it eliminates any actual rule breaking. If their balls are found to be under inflated pre-game, there is no foul, no penalty.

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I disagree strongly with this. It’s the refs’ job to do that, not the team’s. The refs handled the balls on every play; if they didn’t notice why do you expect the team would?

259

Deflate-gate sadly preempted news coverage of that Seattle comeback which was simply amazing.

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Exactly! Physics should be invariant. You can’t get around it.

So in your model, physics is the mechanism of the change for 10 balls.

You still need another mechanism for one ball to get to 10.5 psi, and presumably another different mechanism to get another one to 12.5. How is this hard to grasp? :confused:

By the way, the 1.0 psi change is the maximum amount that physics could account for. Taking, as fact, the report that the Colts balls were legal before the game and that they were legal at halftime, the greatest change those balls could have undergone would have been from 13.5 to 12.5, or 1 psi due to cold weather. So that’s why modifying the Florio assertion is crucial to Pats defenders. It can’t be “closer to 1”, it has to be 1.0, or the physics doesn’t work.