The-Hogs.net - Washington Football Discussion, Redskins to Commanders Era

Deadskins wrote:The NFL has confirmed that 11 of the Patriots' 12 balls were under-inflated by 2 psi. Is this a big deal?

DarthMonk wrote:It actually could have come down to where they were inflated. If they were inflated in a warm room, the pressure simply could have dropped outdoors due to cool temps contracting the air inside the balls (happens all the time to tires in the winter) while inflating outdoors with already cool air would have kept the pressure pretty constant.

I see "weight" being miss-used a lot in this story. It is PRESSURE in pounds per square inch, not WEIGHT in pounds.

SkinsJock* wrote:It seems these QBs all like different pressure (PSI) in the balls they use in the game ... Brady likes a 'softer' ball and Rodgers tries to get more PSI than is 'allowed' ...

so ... it is not a big deal although I'm sure there will be fines handed out ...

Deadskins wrote:

SkinsJock* wrote:It seems these QBs all like different pressure (PSI) in the balls they use in the game ... Brady likes a 'softer' ball and Rodgers tries to get more PSI than is 'allowed' ...
so ... it is not a big deal although I'm sure there will be fines handed out

Untrue. Over-inflating is legal, under-inflating is not. This was discovered by the Indy player who intercepted Brady. He noticed right off that the ball was under-inflated. And it's a huge deal when your team has a competitive edge by tampering with the equipment.

SkinsJock wrote:btw - I see that I've got an asterisk again - gotta love it

Deadskins wrote:

SkinsJock wrote:btw - I see that I've got an asterisk again - gotta love it

Did you click the link?

Deadskins wrote:

DarthMonk wrote:It actually could have come down to where they were inflated. If they were inflated in a warm room, the pressure simply could have dropped outdoors due to cool temps contracting the air inside the balls (happens all the time to tires in the winter) while inflating outdoors with already cool air would have kept the pressure pretty constant.

I see "weight" being miss-used a lot in this story. It is PRESSURE in pounds per square inch, not WEIGHT in pounds.

I said psi, and the where inflated argument doesn't hold water. Why was the 12th ball not under-inflated. Why were Indy's balls all properly inflated. I agree this is a big deal, especially in light of Belicheat's history of unfair practices. The balls are supposed to be inspected by the ref for compliance.

I wrote:It actually could have come down to where they were inflated.

DarthMonk wrote:

Deadskins wrote:The NFL has confirmed that 11 of the Patriots' 12 balls were under-inflated by 2 psi. Is this a big deal?

2 is a lot. Take 2 psi out of a basketball (similar psi for both balls) and dribble it. The difference is almost startling.

It actually could have come down to where they were inflated. If they were inflated in a warm room, the pressure simply could have dropped outdoors due to cool temps contracting the air inside the balls (happens all the time to tires in the winter) while inflating outdoors with already cool air would have kept the pressure pretty constant.

I see "weight" being miss-used a lot in this story. It is PRESSURE in pounds per square inch, not WEIGHT in pounds.

DarthMonk wrote:

Deadskins wrote:

DarthMonk wrote:It actually could have come down to where they were inflated. If they were inflated in a warm room, the pressure simply could have dropped outdoors due to cool temps contracting the air inside the balls (happens all the time to tires in the winter) while inflating outdoors with already cool air would have kept the pressure pretty constant.

I see "weight" being miss-used a lot in this story. It is PRESSURE in pounds per square inch, not WEIGHT in pounds.

I said psi, and the where inflated argument doesn't hold water. Why was the 12th ball not under-inflated. Why were Indy's balls all properly inflated. I agree this is a big deal, especially in light of Belicheat's history of unfair practices. The balls are supposed to be inspected by the ref for compliance.

I know you said psi but many others did not.

I am not arguing that this was due to where they were inflated. I'm saying as

I wrote:It actually could have come down to where they were inflated.

I can't answer your 2 questions definitively but it is not too hard to come up with scenarios.

The 12th ball question remains regardless of how this happened.

Maybe Indy inflated theirs with "normal" air instead of air at say 100 degree F which would do the trick on a 45 degree F day. The pressure would even diminish gradually and possibly not be noticed by refs while an assistant on the Indy sideline might notice instantly after handling the legit Indy balls before encountering the intercepted Pat ball.

The Pats could have even experimented with this a lot and figured out precisely what temp air to inflate with in different weather condidtions. It's an easy problem.

Holding water without any problem.

Using a 90º indoor temperature, we get a final pressure of 10.5 psi.

Deadskins wrote:

SkinsJock* wrote:It seems these QBs all like different pressure (PSI) in the balls they use in the game ... Brady likes a 'softer' ball and Rodgers tries to get more PSI than is 'allowed' ...

so ... it is not a big deal although I'm sure there will be fines handed out ...

Untrue. Over-inflating is legal, under-inflating is not. This was discovered by the Indy player who intercepted Brady. He noticed right off that the ball was under-inflated. And it's a huge deal when your team has a competitive edge by tampering with the equipment.

* http://thehogs.net/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 23#p647623

NFL footballs, according to the rule book, must be inflated with 12.5-13.5 pounds per square inch.

After Thursday's Pro Bowl practice at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona, Jackson said he couldn't tell whether the ball he intercepted in the second quarter of a 45-7 loss to the New England Patriots was or wasn't deflated below the threshold allowed by the NFL.

"I'm a linebacker, I'm a defensive guy," Jackson said. "If anybody recognized anything it definitely wouldn't come from me."

D'Qwell Jackson may have caught Tom Brady's interception, but he says he wasn't the one who noticed the deflation on the Patriots' football.
After picking off Patriots quarterback Tom Brady with about 9:21 left in the first half, Jackson said he gave the ball to the Colts' equipment staff to save for him as a "souvenir." He didn't know what happened to the football after that and said it's still "beyond" him as to what the chain of events were.

Among the many people who had contact with the Patriots pigskin used in Sunday's AFC championship — which were reportedly underinflated — were the ball boys. And one former ball boy (who did not take part in Sunday's match) told NBC News that his goal was always to prepare the ball to the quarterback's preference and hope they passed inspection, and that it would have been very difficult to tamper with them afterward.

Eric Kester, who was a ball boy for the Chicago Bears in 2003, says he can't speculate about the controversy dubbed "Deflate-Gate," but he remembers how the preparation worked — starting with the delivery of factory-fresh balls a few days before a game.

"We would then work with the quarterbacks to customize the balls to their liking. This involved scrubbing them with stiff horsehair brushes to rub off the leather's slippery silicone sheen, and occasionally inflating or deflating the balls a very small amount, which I believe is legal to a degree. Quarterbacks are very particular about the way a ball feels in their hand, and we worked meticulously to match their particular preferences," Kester said.

Two hours before kickoff, he would bring the balls to the referees' locker room for inspection.

"I recall them having a pressure gauge in the locker room, but most often they just squeezed the balls, turned them over in their hands a few times each, and inspected the laces. I don't recall them ever rejecting one of our balls," he said.

"My thought process was, 'Let's get the balls exactly the way our quarterback wants them, and if the refs reject one or two before the game, no big deal. But there's no harm giving them our ideal balls and hoping they make it through inspection.'"

By Felice J. FreyerGLOBE STAFF JANUARY 26, 2015
It’s basic physics, folks.

Four of the Boston area’s best scientific minds, zeroing in on the controversy over the Patriots’ use of underinflated footballs, agreed: If you take a ball from a warm place to a cool place, it will lose air pressure.

“Professor Belichick got it exactly right,” said Richard P. Binzel, professor of planetary science at MIT, referring to the Patriots’ coach, Bill Belichick.

On Saturday, Belichick blamed “atmospheric conditions” for the lower-than-required air pressure in 11 out of 12 Patriot footballs in the team’s 45-7 win over the Indianapolis Colts a week ago. Belichick said the game balls had been inflated to the regulation 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch and then got softer in the 51-degree air.

Although not all were ready to endorse the Patriots’ theory, the scientists contacted Sunday agreed that the team’s explanations do not defy the laws of nature.

“Everything they said doesn’t seem impossible to me,” said James Bird, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University. “Based on simple ideal-gas-law calculations, I would not be surprised if the Patriots are vindicated. That said, there are many unknowns that can make small differences. . . . ”

Binzel said the basic facts apply everywhere. “If you take a football at room temperature and take it outside to a cold playing field, the ball pressure will go down every time,” he said. “This is true not just at Foxborough but at every playing field, whether here on earth or all the way out to Pluto.”

Binzel calculated that a 5 to 10 percent dip in temperature could bring about a drop of 0.5 to 1.5 pounds per square inch, or psi, in a ball’s air pressure.

As for reports that the pressure had dropped by as much as 2 pounds per square inch in some of the balls, Binzel said that “there are a lot of fuzzy numbers” being talked about, and the accuracy of the meters used to measure the footballs is unknown.

Softer footballs are thought to be easier to handle, and the NFL is investigating whether the Patriots deliberately sought an advantage by underinflating the balls.

Harvard’s L. Mahadevan said he found Bill Belichick’s argument within the realm of possibility.

In his press conference Saturday, Belichick explained that the team had conducted a simulation to determine how the air pressure could have dropped. Along with cooler temperatures, he also offered another factor: The team routinely rubs the balls to break them in, a process that he said can raise the air pressure by heating the ball. Then, he said, the pressure could drop once the balls were turned over to the referees.

Michael J. Naughton, chairman of the physics department at Boston College, called the ball-rubbing argument “technically possible.”

“If there’s enough friction, it could change the pressure,” he said. If the pressure measurements were taken soon after this “rubdown,” the balls would be starting out warmer than room temperature, making for a steeper drop in temperature.

“I’m not forming any opinions on what happened,” Naughton added. But there is no question that temperature affects pressure, and every football on every football field in history has lost pressure when brought from a warm place to a cooler one, he said.

L. Mahadevan, a professor of applied mathematics, physics, and biology at Harvard, also found Belichick’s argument within the realm of possibility. “If the ball was just at regulation pressure indoors after the players had worked with it, it very well could depressurize a little — but that depends on the temperature difference, all other things being equal (which may not be the case),” he wrote in an e-mail.

Mahadevan estimated that a drop from 80 degrees to 53 degrees would cause the pressure to fall from 12.5 to 11.9 pounds per square inch.

Mahadevan’s calculations explain only a small drop in pressure, but not one as great as the 2 pounds per square inch that had been reported.

But Bird points out that only small differences are at play, and the measurements are not precise enough to draw conclusions. “If it lost 5 psi, I think this would be a very different conversation,” he said.

Under NFL rules, each team supplies their own footballs to the game. The Belichick explanation suggests that the Colts, who have not faced similar questions, may have used balls with higher air pressure.

The Patriots are preparing to face the Seattle Seahawks in Sunday’s Super Bowl, even as the air pressure controversy that has come be known as Deflategate continues among fans and scientists.

At least one attempt to reproduce conditions on the football field seems to support the Patriots. HeadSmart Labs, a Pittsburgh research company working on preventing head injuries from sports, said that it conducted a study that found weather and field conditions alone could have lowered the pressure by as much as 1.95 psi.

“We took 12 brand-new authentic NFL footballs and exposed them to the different elements they would have experienced throughout the game,” said Thomas Healy, founder of HeadSmart Labs, in a press release. “Out of the 12 footballs we tested, we found that, on average, footballs dropped 1.8 psi when being exposed to dropping temperatures and wet conditions.”

Meanwhile, Bill Nye the Science Guy, who has become a minor celebrity for his ability to make science understandable to the masses, couldn’t help but weigh in. He told “Good Morning America’’ that Belichick’s explanation about rubbing the footballs did not make sense.

But Nye added: “I cannot help but say, Go Seahawks.”

As for the Boston-area professors, could they be influenced by their football allegiances? They all said no. Naughton is a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan, but said, “My answers to any of these questions don’t change regardless of whether I’m a fan or not.”

Mahadevan does not follow football at all. Bird says he will probably watch the game but is not passionate about it.

And Binzel acknowledges being a Patriots fan, but notes: “The laws of physics know no fandom. The laws of physics play no favorites.”

Report: League has suspect in 'Deflategate'
FOX's Jay Glazer reports the NFL has identified a Patriots locker room attendant as a "strong person of interest" in the ball-deflation scandal.
The league finally has its Ollie North. Per Glazer, the attendant "allegedly took balls from the officials' locker room to another area on way to the field." There is reportedly video of the incident. Glazer says the league is "still gauging if any wrong doing occurred." It's been obvious from Day 1 the Pats were going to set up some sort of underling as the fall guy, the only question is if he'll sing. The entire "scandal" is long past played out. It would be a shame were it to dominate all pre-SB chatter.

Deadskins wrote:The NFL has confirmed that 11 of the Patriots' 12 balls were under-inflated by 2 psi. Is this a big deal?