With temperatures for Sunday’s playoff game in Minnesota between the Vikings and Seahawks expected to hover around 0 degrees, we may have ourselves a perfect opportunity for the NFL to determine exactly what weather conditions can do to the air pressure inside a football. But we highly doubt the league will take advantage, and the reason for that is obvious.
They’re afraid.
Whether you think Tom Brady and the New England Patriots were guilty in Deflategate or not, most of us can agree that the “investigation” was a joke. Heck, NFL officials admitted during Brady’s appeal hearing that they had no idea footballs could deflate naturally. And even in the infamous Ted Wells report, it was determined that the pressure drop in most of the Patriots’ game balls from last year’s AFC Championship Game could be explained by the Ideal Gas Law. Of course, Wells determined that the official who tested the balls used readings from the gauge that made the Patriots look worse, even though said official thought he used the other one.
So what about Minnesota? Dr. Michael Naughton, chair of the physics department at Boston College, told Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports that the air pressure in the footballs during that game could drop to as low as 9.0 psi in the brutally cold temperatures. The NFL requires balls to be inflated to between 12.5 and 13.5 psi before games, so that would be a very dramatic drop.
Naughton said the pressure could even get to 8.0 psi if windchill is a major factor.
“Ignoring the wind chill (meaning the following is a conservative estimate, meaning the wind chill could make the on-field ball pressure even lower), the on-field ball pressure will be about 9 psi (assuming it was pressurized to 12.5 psi at 70F and measured on-field at 0F),” he explained.
“The pressure will, unambiguously, drop several psi. The game will be played with these ‘illegal’ balls.”
An NFL spokesman told Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio that game balls are tested “randomly” and he could not say whether they will be tested during the Vikings-Seahawks game.
In fairness, it was about 50 degrees when the Patriots played the Indianapolis Colts in last year’s playoffs. But wouldn’t it be a bad look for the NFL if the balls were tested in Minnesota and the league had to inform everyone that they dropped a full 3.5 to 5.5 psi? Considering some of the Patriots’ balls were less than a pound underinflated using one of the pressure gauges (see the actual numbers here), the numbers from Minnesota might result in logical fans thinking something like this:
What the hell were we talking about all summer long?
We have gone over the sting operation narrative enough times already, and the comment one NFL official made certainly made it seem like the NFL had an axe to grind. The bottom line is the league stands very little to gain by testing the PSI in extreme conditions like the ones forecast for Minnesota this weekend. Doing so would only remind fans — and NFL owners, for that matter — how much time and money was wasted on the Deflategate investigation.
