Full Disclosure - I have been a Patriots fan since the 70s who suffered through decades of mediocrity with occasional flashes of competency prior to 2001. This scandal has made me question my allegiance to the Patriots. I respect innovation done within the rules e.g. the ineligible receiver ploy against Baltimore but outright cheating is a whole other thing.
I want to propose a scenario and get opinions on whether this would be a violation of NFL rules or if someone can identify a flaw in the scenario that would make it unworkable.
First, to my understanding, each team provides a dozen footballs to the referee for inspection prior to the game after which the balls cannot be tampered with. The balls are checked to make sure they are inflated between 12.5 PSI and 13.5 PSI during the inspection. So, in essence the rule is the team must provide a properly inflated ball two hours before the game and may not tamper with the ball after that time.
Given the cold weather in the northeast and knowing that Brady prefers a softer ball in cold wet conditions, could the equipment manager make sure the game balls are stored in an especially warm area, make sure they measure 12.51 PSI, and give them to the officials for inspection? They would pass inspection and would naturally lose pressure especially once taken outside.
I will concede such action may be against the spirit of the rules but what rule can you point to that has been specifically broken? Could this be the explanation of what occurred during the AFC championship game. Is this smart “taking all the edge you can” or outright cheating?
It seems plausible to me at least. People keep quoting the broadcast from the Patriots-Packers game a few weeks ago, where Nantz and Simms talk about their discussions with Aaron Rodgers about how he likes the footballs prepared. They quote Rodgers as saying he has the balls inflated past the limit and hopes the officials don’t take any air out. That seems to be perfectly fine by the rules - you bring the balls to the ref, who can either sign off on them or adjust their pressure himself. There’s no penalty if the ref has to adjust the pressure.
Of course the claim people are making here is that the Patriots deflated the balls after the ref had signed off on them, which would be directly against the rule.
It depends on how extreme the measures taken were. I would say storing the balls in an oven to inflate the PSI reading, if you will, would be such a violation of the spirit of the rule as to be deemed illegal.
To me this whole thing is the equivalent of a corked bat in baseball. Everybody knows it’s illegal whether it’s really performance enhancing or not. Would Sammy Sosa hit as many home runs with a regulation bat? Probably. Now steroids are another story.
I think what many people seem to be upset about, more so than the actual air pressure of footballs, is the apparent culture of cheating in the Pats org. Whether justified or not, many are perceiving it that way. That’s why the discussion continues.
I’m tired of it already. I just want to see a good Superbowl.
Obviously it’s impossible now, but it would be interesting to test the balls from a lot of games, from lots of teams. I have a suspicion that a not insignificant number of them would be out of spec. It just seems sort of like people haven’t really cared about it much until this happened.
Interesting twist - a report that the officials do not always measure the balls PSI with a pressure gauge but only inspect them visually and by squeezing them: ball boy’s perspective via NBC News.
It’s amazing to me how many people can’t seem to get the physics correct, even those who should know better, like physics professors.
This article, for example, quotes Mike Eads, physics professor at Northern Illinois University:
Prof. Eads has at least accounted for absolute temperature in his calculation, but forgets that footballs are measured using gauge pressure (psig), which is the pressure above atmospheric pressure. To use the ideal gas law, not only do you have to convert temperatures measured in degrees Fahrenheit to absolute temperatures, but you have to convert gauge pressures to absolute pressures.
To convert from psig (gauge pressure) to psia (absolute pressure), you need to add 14.7 psi to account for atmospheric pressure: 0 psig = 14.7 psia; and 12.5 psig = 27.2 psia.
Redoing the erroneous calculation above indicates that the same football that measures 12.5 psig (27.2 psia) at 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 deg C or 293 K), would actually drop to 10.6 psig (25.3 psia) in 32 degree Fahrenheit (0 deg C or 273 K) weather.
Since the whole controversy hinges on just a 2 psi difference, it would seem important to get this part right.
I wonder if the reason that ref often just check the footballs by feel is, until last week, no one actually cared about a precise psi level in the football? And that the rule of whatever the accepted range is supposed to be is a generally arbitrarily chosen range of what feels like a properly inflated football, and the spirit of that rule is to set a number so that the football is inflated to what a football is generally supposed to feel like. Several credible people have reported they didn’t notice any difference between a 12.5 psi and 10.5 psi football. But this surreal, bloodthirsty mob, filled with glee masked as faux outrage, is so absolutely certain that air MUST have been let out of the footballs after the refs approved the footballs, that people are actually calling for Brady to retire, for the Patriots tossed form the superbowl- all due to an unproven suggestion that a rule was broken that the rulebook calls for a $25k fine for breaking.
It’s notable that in the minimal info the NFL has released, they have not specifically said that the refs used a gauge to test the footballs before the game. If it was confirmed that they did, it would seem like an important detail to include…The completely plausible scenario that the ref’s checked the footballs by hand, -because maybe precise psi has never been important, as long as it feels inflated like a football is supposed to be- approved them, and then they turned out to be 2 psi lower (which could have been about 1 psi under when checked pre game, as numerous calculations out there show a ball at 12.5 psi in a 70 degree room could drop 1 psi with 30 degree drop in temperature)- that scenario is not even being entertained as even a remote possibility. No, the only possible option is Brady and Belichick must be lying, must be guilty, and the only question is how should they be punished in the most extreme way anyone has ever been punished in NFL history, for breaking a rule that until last week was so insignificant that it had never even been considered worth even accusing, let alone fining, anyone else for breaking ever before. No actual proof that they even did it? Irrelevant. There are raging bloodthirsty masses that want so bad for it to be true that they would swear on their children’s lives that it couldn’t possibly not be, all so they can piss on the grave of what they hope to be a fallen superstar who they had irrational level of hatred for before all this happened anyways. And a disturbing number of them are national reporters and journalists.
This link presents an analysis of fumbles lost per offensive play for all teams in the league.
It shows that the rate at which the Patriots fumbled the ball over the last five years was dramatically lower than every other team in the league. The probability of seeing a difference like that observed just by chance was 1 in 16,000.
The analysis also showed that this supernormal ability of the Patriots to hold on to the ball suddenly appeared in 2007. Since that time, they have been #1 in the league in this stat every year.
Additional numbers: Players that have played with the Patriots and with other teams fumble at more than double the rate with other teams than they do with the Patriots.
Surely if guilty, then one of the many ball attendants, or dozens of other employees who would have witnessed or at least have 2nd hand knowledge of it over the past 15 years, will fess up to letting air out of the balls after inspection. Once that happens, the question of if the Patriots broke the rule or not will be settled.
