When the news first emerged in January that the Patriots were being investigated for tampering with the air pressure inside footballs used in the AFC title game, my wife had some questions. Our conversation quickly became an Abbott-and-Costello routine, with yours truly playing the role of Costello. As usual.
“Why is this important?” she said.
“Because the NFL said it is.”
“Why does the NFL think it’s important?”
“Because it’s in the rule book.”
“What’s in the rule book?”
“The amount of pressure that has to be in the balls.”
“How did it get there?”
“Someone put it there.”
“Who?”
“The NFL.”
“When air is let out of the football, does it still look like a football?”
“Yes.”
“So why do they take air out of it?”
“Because that makes it easier for the quarterback to throw.”
“Isn’t that what the NFL wants?”
Indeed it is. That’s why, when the NFL changed the procedures for kicking balls more than a decade ago, the NFL didn’t use a similar fresh-from-the-box approach for balls used by the offense. And that’s why, in 2006, the NFL modified the rules to allow visiting teams to bring their own balls to a game, instead of using the ones the home team gave them.
In the aftermath of the AFC title game, NFL V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino explained that the 12.5-to-13.5-PSI range has been in place for decades, with no debate or analysis over whether the range should change.
“I have rule books going back to 1940 in my office, and that was in the 1940 rule book,” Blandino told reporters in January. “[NFL Senior Vice President of Player Personnel and Football Operations] Joel Bussert, who many of you know in the league office who’s kind of a historian, he’s got rule books that go back prior to that. It’s been in there even before 1940.”
Blandino also acknowledged that the league will look at whether to adjust the range. But it could be too late to allow teams to use even less than 12.5 PSI, given the time, effort, and money invested in determined whether the Patriots deliberately did just that. How can the NFL punish the Patriots for undermining the integrity of the game by going below 12.5 PSI and then relax that standards so that anyone can do it without consequence?
Inflation of the football within the proper range is a big deal because the NFL made it a big deal, from the moment two grossly conflicting pressure gauges were inserted into 11 Patriots footballs at halftime of the playoff game against the Colts. The problem is that it wasn’t a big deal before that very moment -- even though the NFL knew before the game started that the Colts suspected that the Patriots were deflating footballs.
Check out the video at the top of this item from Peter King of TheMMQB.com regarding the manner in which the officials check football pressure. It’s clear that, as of 2013, the precise amount of air inside a football was anything but a big deal.
“12.5, that’s close enough,” one official says after cramming the gauge into the ball, pulling it out, and tossing it to another official. In another portion of that same video, an official is alarmed by the amount of air hissing out of the ball before adjusting the valve on the gauge, popping it in again, and then flipping it to someone else, presumably because it was “close enough.”
The rigorous (and flawed) scientific analysis of the measurements taken of the AFC title game footballs at halftime presumes a degree of care and certainty that didn’t previously exist. Sure, Rule 2 requires the football to contain a urethane bladder inflated to 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch. But the rule never has been interpreted as imposing a duty on the referee to periodically ensure that the football remains within that range. However, as the Ideal Gas Law demonstrates (based on the Wells report), a wet, 48-degree day in January results in the footballs being anywhere from 0.98 to 1.18 PSI below the minimum at halftime.
How low would the pressure have been in the fourth quarter? In overtime? In double overtime?
How much air pressure remained in the football when Bart Starr scored from the one in the final minute of the Ice Bowl?
Then there’s the chain of custody, or lack thereof, that applies to the handling of the footballs. In the AFC title game, referee Walt Anderson lost the footballs for the first time in his 19 years as an official, but he neither took the balls back inside for re-inflation (if needed) nor used the alternate footballs, which hadn’t been lost.
"[T]he balls shall remain under the supervision of the Referee until they are delivered to the ball attendant just prior to the start of the game,” Rule 2 also states. That didn’t happen prior to the AFC title game, and that wasn’t a big deal. None of it was a big deal until Colts linebacker D’Qwell Jackson’s interception of a Tom Brady pass set in motion a chain of events that resulted in the footballs being checked and re-inflated at halftime -- and that sparked an all-out investigation even though the numbers generated by one of the two pressure gauges ultimately didn’t suggest that anything was amiss.
The league officials presumably believed measurements reflecting numbers less than 12.5 PSI indicated a problem because, possibly, no one at the league office realized before this specific investigation began to unfold that air pressure drops significantly during the course of a game.
Early on, it should have become apparent that the numbers measured by the two grossly out-of-sync pressure gauges didn’t clearly demonstrate that something was amiss. (Instead, someone leaked to ESPN that something was amiss, with 10 of the 12 footballs reportedly a full 2.0 pounds under the minimum.) At that point, someone in the league office should have said that it’s impossible to suddenly make this a big deal when the existing culture of the league -- for decades -- entailed a high degree of nonchalance regarding the procedures and a low degree of understanding regarding the science. Maybe the Patriots were cheating, but the circumstantial evidence of it becomes far less persuasive when the overall circumstances can’t be clearly discerned.
The NFL, via Ted Wells, has nevertheless attempted to apply laboratory-level analysis to a kitchen-sink sausage-making process. It’s impossible to do that, as evidenced by the obvious flaws regarding the two gauges that were used to ensure that the footballs were at 12.5 PSI before kickoff.
Absent the text messages suggesting some sort of concerted effort to make footballs deemed perfect by Tom Brady even more perfect, there’s no way this investigation could have resulted in a finding of wrongdoing. Even with those text messages, the scientific evidence supports a possibility, not a probability, that tampering occurred on that specific day.
Tampering may have occurred on other days. And Tom Brady may be hiding evidence of tampering occurring on multiple occasions by refusing to turn over his text messages and emails. But it’s hard to conclude that tampering happened on January 18, 2015, in large part because the subject matter that became such a big deal the next day had never been one before the moment the needles on those two conflicting gauges were crammed into the 10 footballs.
