If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you may have realized that every so often I like to change things up a bit and talk about some football. And, since this Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday, there probably is no better time to talk about some football than now. However, unless you’ve been living in a hole, under a rock, in a cave on the moon, you’ve probably heard about the shadow that is hanging over the big game this weekend, Deflategate. Now, I will admit outright that I am a Patriots fan, but I think there’s a lot more going on with the whole Deflategate scandal than what is apparent on the surface (and I don’t think it has anything to do with cheating.)
To explain what I mean, let’s start by framing the scandal for anyone that’s a little fuzzy on the details. During the AFC Championship game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots, 11 out of the 12 footballs that the Patriots used on offense were found to be 2 PSI below the minimum limit established by the NFL. This, of course, led to an uproar because many people felt that the Patriots must have deliberately underinflated their footballs to gain some sort of advantage.
There are a couple of fundamental flaws with this notion, however. First, there’s actually no evidence that an underinflated ball would give a team’s offense any significant advantage at all. In fact, according to ESPN, an underinflated ball would fly a little slower, which would actually be more likely to help a defender reach the ball before it reached its intended target. The only advantage that an underinflated ball might give an offensive player is a slightly better grip, but the difference would be hardly noticeable.
The second flaw is that there’s a large number of physics professors that will happily tell you that it’s completely possible that the footballs deflated on their own. This is because of a physics law known as Charles’ Law, which states that the volume of a gas is directly proportional to the absolute temperature when the pressure is constant. This means that the amount of gas (in, this case, air) within an object will decrease as the temperature decreases, so a football inflated just above the league’s minimum in a warm room prior to the game may have had significantly less air in it (and, therefore, a significantly lower PSI) after it spent a couple hours out in the cold. The reason that one of the Patriots footballs and all of the Colt’s footballs were above the minimum when they were tested at halftime is most likely because they were inflated to a higher PSI before the game actually started and, therefore, had more air to lose before they fell below the league minimum.
Now, this brings about an important question: if there was no advantage to using underinflated footballs and there is a logical explanation for how the footballs may have ended up underinflated even though they had the correct pressure at the beginning of the game, why has this become such an issue? The answer is money. Scandals make news outlets, TV stations, and the league itself more money because more people will not only pickup newspapers and watch broadcasts to keep up with the scandal, but will also watch the Super Bowl to root against the alleged “cheaters.” As a result, the reason that most of the news outlets are more than happy to paint the Patriots as cheaters (and the league is more than willing to let them) is that everyone loves a good villain, and a good villain will make more people watch.
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