Roughly six months ago, no casual football fan ever thought about the air pressure inside a football. Most players probably didn’t consider it an important issue, either. And while it would be unreasonable to expect NFL officials to understand all the science behind the inflation level a ball, they have brought much of this on themselves, which is why people like NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent probably should have done a bit more research before they started sticking needles in game balls and releasing information about what the New England Patriots did or did not do wrong.
As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk notes, Vincent admitted during Tom Brady’s appeal hearing that he had no idea a ball could deflate naturally due to weather conditions.
Q: “So prior to this game, okay, had you ever heard of the Ideal Gas Law?”
Vincent: “No sir.”
Question: “Do you know if anyone in the NFL Game-Day Operations had ever discussed the impact of the Ideal Gas Law in testing footballs?”
Vincent: “Not with me.”
Question: “You had never heard to that?”
Vincent: “Never.”
Vincent added that he spoke to fellow NFL game day operations man Mike Gardi about the Patriots’ balls being underinflated and concluded that “further investigation” was needed. However, he said he did not take science or weather conditions into consideration at that time.
Again, it would be unfair to say Vincent and company should have taken a physics course on air pressure in a football. But did the initial news leaks from Deflategate — many of which came from the league — take a “let’s wait and see before pointing fingers” tone? No, they did not.
Instead, fingers were pointed immediately. One of the biggest names in the NFL media reported that 11 of the 12 balls the Patriots used in the first half were two pounds per square inch underinflated. That wasn’t true. An NFL executive emailed the Patriots informing them that one of their balls measured at 10.1 psi. That wasn’t true, either.
The more we learn, the more it sounds like this former New York Jets employee and a bunch of other guys who work for the NFL office were so giddy about nailing the Patriots that they could hardly see straight.
