12.5 PSI (above atmosphere) at room temperature 70F, chilled to 20F (field temp) would create just about a 2PSI drop.
I should have known I’d screw that up. I retract my point and now claim the opposite!
Plus, there is a control group. The reports seem to indicate that Indy’s balls were just fine.
I agree. I assume the Ref’s dropped the ball here, and no one tampered after the officials checked. I assume there is no penalty for underinflated balls at the pre-game check. The officials would just say, “put some more air in these.” If they don’ notice, it’s not really cheating.
And I say this as a huge Seahawk fan who has no love for the Pats.
Well, Belichick and now Brady have categorically denied that they deliberately tampered with the balls in any way and stated that they have no idea what happened. So the lines in the sand have been pretty clearly drawn.
I cannot believe this has exploded the way it has. It seems like it’s getting as much domestic coverage as Charlie Hebdo, and that is pathetic.
OK, this makes sense to me.
So why isn’t ESPN…or anyone else in the media…getting Sheldon Cooper, or someone more media friendly :D, to give a crash course in Boyle’s Law, Charles’ Law, Gay-Lussac Law?
/(mostly) rhetorical
To pump up the super bowl buzz & viewership? To move a step closer to WWF?
It would have been funny if Tom Brady had shown up with a MIT physics professor and the Professor gave a lecture on Charles’ Law
Former NFL kicker Chris Kluwe weighs in (no pun intended)
In the Patriots’ favor, at least the murderer on their team actually got kicked out and went to jail.
Where are you getting this? The rules say…
The Colts player who identified the underinflated ball says no he didn’t.
I was coming here to post that very same thing. Didn’t even one of their PR people think it might bd a good idea not to have a big red FLEXBALL on each side of Billy B’s head?
Oh the sweet irony.
Huh…
Okay, blast me, ignore me, get concerned over me, whichever, there have been some great discussions in The Game Room (and occasionally there still are), and I’m not going to stop coming here, and I haven’t been a football fan in ages but I guess there’s no avoiding this particular froofraw, so what the hell…I’m saying my piece.
The one thing that I find so damn irritating about all this, other than that it’s just going on and on and on…well, okay, that’s actually a valid point, let’s get to that. Okay, sports is hype-driven. I know that. I’ve made peace with that fact long ago. The draft is overhyped, the Boston Red Sox are overhyped, Peyton Manning is overhyped, the “Sweet Sixteen” (for the life of me I still cannot think of a more inappropriate name for “freaking four wins from what you came here for”) is overhyped…okay. The thing is, generally the hype is deserved. Maybe not that much, maybe not that fervent, but for the most part these are legitimately big things. Love him or hate him (although I suspect the vast majority of the country was in “just plain done with him” territory by the end), Tim Tebow completely winning the hearts of a demographic not normally associated with football was a pretty big deal. And when the media does raise a firestorm over nothing for whatever reason, it invariably flames out as quickly as it arrived and is never mentioned again. Remember Maniti Teo?
But when something drags on, endlessly, and there is so much drama, and so much grandstanding, and so much wailing and moaning, and it goes on for weeks or months with no end in sight, and there is absolutely nothing new for the entire duration, and every damn sports outlet obligingly follows on, week after week, month after month, in the futile hope that something will happen and justify all the time and money and energy the poured into the story…well, the word “Sisyphean” comes to mind, and “soul-crushing” fits as well. I remember the slog that was the Lance Armstrong investigation, and as YEARS went by with more and more allegations, more and more suspicions, more and more rumors, more and more Stuff That Didn’t Look Right, or Didn’t Sound Right, more and more testimonies, more and more fingers pointed, more and more 100% ironclad assurances that He Was Dirty I Just Know It, more and more and more and more goddam meaningless crap that didn’t move the needle one angstrom towards “clean” or “dirty”, I eventually started saying, “Please, just one smoking gun! Anything! I don’t care how this ends, just so long as it ends!”
And that’s where I dread “Inflategate*” is going. Heck, the fact that ESPN’s still taking about it is a red flag. The narrative seems to be: “Okay, the Colts would’ve been demolished anyway, but that’s not important! And we’re not sure if the Patriots actually tampered with the balls or if it was just the weather, but that’s not important! And it would’ve given them at best a tiny advantage, but that’s not important! There’s a long, long pattern of behavior, and even though most of it is at best chickenscratch or stuff the whole league did, like “Spygate*”, that’s not important either! You must get extremely outraged over this and demand that the NFL come down on the Patriots organization like 50 tons of bricks!”
Look, I’ll make this as simple as possible…I can’t do it. Not after a college team won after being given a second fourth down (pretty much as ironclad a case for a team that shouldn’t have won as it’s flippin’ possible to get) and the pollsters voting that team #1 anyway. Not after Futahaguro got the most undeserved Yokozuna promotion ever and proceeded to become 500 times as embarrassing as Konishiki at his absolute worst. Not after the Seattle Seahawks get flat-out robbed in the Super Bowl (you know it and I know it, dammit) because Jerome Bettis Deserved A Ring. Not after a pitcher gets robbed of a perfect game because of a horrible call that Lt. Frank Drebin wouldn’t have blown, and there being absolutely no possible corrective action whatsoever BECAUSE BASEBALL. Not after that worthless ignorant bloviating hack John McCain tried to kill MMA by comparing it to animals forced to fight to the death, and no one on Capitol Hill making the slightest effort to determine if there was any credence to his drunken ravings. Hell, don’t even get me started on the disgraceful farce that the Olympics used to be; until around 1996, it was crammed with enough shenanigans, corruption, and massive bungles to put WCW to shame. I’ve seen brazen cheating, I’ve seen horrific injustice, I’ve seen gross favoritism, and this isn’t it.
And I am all, utterly, completely out of craps to give.
Bah. Feh. When does Tiger Woods play again?
- Could we please stop using “-gate” to name every single damn bit of suspected wrongdoing on the planet? The Watergate was the name a hotel! It was not a scandal involving water! I’m not even the first person to bring that up on SDMB!
Ohio State physics prof Dr. Michael Lisa says:
Hard to believe the weather effected 11 of 12 Patriot balls but none from the Colts.
Whatever, I agree that this football deflation issue has gone on long enough. Someone in the Patriots organization - whether it was the coach, the QB, or a rogue ball boy - tried to get away with something. They got caught. Fine the team and let’s move on.
Even if Tom Brady came out in the first place with, “I didn’t like the grip of the ball before the game and I requested the ball boy let some air out,” I bet there would be no more punishment than a fine. No suspensions or loss of draft picks or game forfeitures.
Has anybody reported on what pressure the Colts usually use for their balls? If the Pats are usually at the low end of the range and the Colts are usually at the high end, that could potentially explain the discrepancy.
Temperature really can’t explain the thing, unless the official’s locker room was really hot and the Colts overinflate their ball. Every time I do the math, I get a one pound reduction assuming 70F for the locker room and a field temperature of about 50 (official gametime temperature was 51).
What it can do is let us hypothesize that the Patriots inflated to 11.5 psi and the Colts to 13.5. The refs check was not that rigorous, and the Patriots balls felt “close enough”. Then the temperature change causes the Pats balls to fall to 10.5, and the Colts to 12.5.
Just one possibility of many. I wonder, really, if there is any way to determine what happened unless somebody actually comes out and says “I did it!”, which seems unlikely. This may be one of those things where the final determination is “the footballs were underinflated; we don’t know why; we can’t really do anything about it”.
That seems most likely to me, especially with what Rodgers said about them overinflating the balls.
I can’t believe some of the reporting on this, although maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. There was the Rosenberg article mentioned earlier, and then this Ian O’Connor article expressing amazement that Brady wouldn’t notice that the ball weighed two pounds less. They’ve changed that part on ESPN now, it seems.
Interesting. I knew that both offensive and defensive players kept balls as keepsakes following touchdowns or interceptions. But now that I know that each team brings 12 of their own balls, I’m surprised that they let opposing defenses keep the other team’s balls.
And the mismanagement at the NFL’s C-suite continues. They’ve provided absolutely nothing worthwhile to the fans and media yet besides claiming that they’ve launched an investigation. But no one had even spoken to Brady yet? He’s the one person that would have directly benefited from the under-inflated balls. Goodell continues to prefer burying his head in the sand while hoping that the problem goes away. Without a strong and definitive statement from the NFL stating that the Patriots had nothing to do with it, this Patriots dynasty will be permanently discounted by everyone outside of the New England fan base. They will never be regarded amongst the 60’s Packers, 70’s Steelers, 80’s Niners or 90’s Cowboys.
Belichick is the Richard Nixon of football. No one’s going to believe he isn’t up to something sneaky.
If the balls were under inflated I doubt it made much difference. But I guess it’s a rule and it is worth a fine. Especially when you consider all the other rules in the NFL that are much more stupid. Like Marshawn Lynch being warned that he would be ejected from the game if his shoes were gold colored. Or all the stupid taunting penalties or celebrating penalties. Compared to that I think not maintaining the equipment to specs is a bigger deal.
But who even made this rule? For all I know they could have just pulled some numbers out of a hat and as long as the balls were inflated no one cared.