While one report indicated that the NFL has concluded that the footballs the New England Patriots used in the AFC Championship Game were deflated by humans rather than weather conditions, the league stopped short of saying that in its official statement on Friday. Why? The evidence likely is not there yet, and it may never be.
The main reason people feel it is safe to conclude that someone deflated the Patriots footballs after they were inspected is that the game balls used by both teams were tested at halftime. The Indianapolis Colts’ balls remained within the legal inflation range of 12.5 to 13.5 PSI. New England’s did not. What if what happened to the balls fell somewhere between cheating and Mother Nature?
I think we can all agree that the Patriots love pushing the limits of the NFL rulebook. We saw a perfect example of that with the funky formations they used against the Baltimore Ravens a few weeks ago. With that in mind, what if the Pats found a way to inflate their game balls in an environment that would lead to significant deflation hours later? Like, for example, a sauna.
Dr. Allen Sanderson, a research scientist at the University of Utah, believes the deflation of the Patriots’ footballs occurred “naturally.” According to Sanderson, the balls could certainly lose 2.0 PSI of air pressure in a 50-degree environment if they were inflated in an extreme temperature like that inside a sauna.
“The NFL rules are very much ambiguous really because they’re not specifying a temperature,” Sanderson told USA Today Sports. “They’re just specifying a pressure, and temperature makes all the difference in the world about how you make that measurement. Us science geeks picked up on it.
“If you put it in the moisture with the hot air, then what happens is that some of the air — which is moist water — it could condense and then it could even more rapidly lose pressure. They may consider it not illegal, but if they actually did it, does that really pass the moral test?”
I’m not a scientist, but I proposed to same question to Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe on Thursday.
One of the reasons this makes sense is that the game balls reportedly remained inside the officials’ locker room util 10 minutes prior to kickoff after they were inspected. Could a ball boy or equipment manager really have deflated 11 or 12 balls by 2.0 PSI each in that 10-minute window? And if so, would it have been done on the sideline where thousands of cameras could be watching?
The reason I’m skeptical about the sauna theory is that you would think Brady had been practicing with his game balls all week. Current and former NFL quarterbacks have already said that quarterbacks like to break in their footballs a certain way, so would Brady want the balls he has been practicing with to be deflated and then reinflated in a sauna that close to game time? If his top priority is having a less inflated ball, I suppose it is possible.
Again, we keep coming back to the officials. Referee Walt Anderson supposedly inspected all of the balls with a pressure gauge before the game, but is there any way the NFL can prove that? One former NFL ball boy says he has seen refs simply do the “squeeze test” when inspecting balls. Until we see some actual evidence, nothing can be ruled out.
