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Gillette might want to check its wallpaper in the press room

Belichick

Like all the rest of us who dropped everything, Fred Somers watched the Belichick "I have no explanation" press conference. He couldn't stop laughing at the background.

Transcript of Belichick's statement.

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How did this go unnoticed by anyone at Gillette?! Most awkward hash tag placement ever.

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Or effective?

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The morning after this "investigation" opened, the NFL Twitter account posted a pic of a pile of uninflated game balls for the Super Bowl to show preparations were underway.

Haha.

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I can't believe he threw Brady, of all people, under the bus!

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He just said the press was barking up the wrong tree.

Throwing him under the bus would be like "Tom came to me and said 'coach, I can't win unless we deflate the balls illegally' and I told him to go for it".

If he never even looks at a football during the game, then what answer do you want him to give? The Superman Super-shield answer? "I'm responsible for everything and everyone and if I fart I always double-check that it didn't change the external pressure on any of our game balls so when they came back under-inflated I know exactly why...but I'm not telling any of you"?

I'm revoking your man card if you think that's being "thrown under the bus".

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I think he is setting up Brady to take the hit for this. Someone has to fess up, Krafty must be lurid beyond belief. Someone has to have control of the ball situation, the cast of characters is limited. But the timing is suspect. How where the balls ok at check in , then some how in violation by half time.

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Brady is going to come out at 4 PM and say "I like my football scuffed and at 12.5 psi. Thanks for coming out. I'm on to Seattle now."

Boom. Done for the day. Nothing new learned.

Also, there are rumors that it wasn't 2 PSI it was 0.2 PSI and that the NFL has reviewed everything they can and not found any instance where someone intentionally deflated the footballs.

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Well, at least one Boston Globe reporter thinks the Bill throwing Brady under the bus description is accurate:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2015/01/22/bill-belichick-message-don-...

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The Globe also employs Shaugnessy. Color me unimpressed that they have more than one dumb sports writer.

He wrote that as if Belichick and Brady have never spoken with each other in the past 3 days or something. Like it's an episode of Beaten Housewives of the NFL between them.

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Lurid beyond belief would probably involve a different set of balls. I believe you meant livid.

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You know, about seeking emergency treatment if you have an excessive lead for more than four hours ... um ... quarters?

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What is up with this physicist? I've seen quotes saying both yes it is possible for the weather to have been a factor in the balls deflating and nope, no way it could possibly be the weather.

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Ignoring changes in external barometric pressure, and using the simple relationships between temperature and pressure*, the ball would lose/gain about 0.0425 psi for every degree Kelvin (Celsius) change in temperature.

That's based on the ball having 12.5 psi at 294K (70F).

So, a ball that had 12.5psi at 70F would have 12.03 psi at 50F(283K). That's without letting any air out (and assuming constant external barometric pressure).

Handy Chart (for a ball inflated to 12.5psi at 70F):
Temperature (F) = Pressure (psi)
-10 (Green Bay day) = 10.5
50 (Sunday's game) = 12.03
70 (indoor temp) = 12.50
90 (hot room/day) = 12.97
100 (Texas day) = 13.22

No wonder Aaron Rodgers likes his ball inflated as full as he can get away with! For a given mass and pressure at 70F, there will be a nearly 3psi range in game ball pressure over the range of temps in a given season!

(*note: I rearranged PV=nRT to get P=T(constant) because volume, mass, and the gas constant are, well, constant; and plugged and chugged)

(note 2: yes, working with both unit systems at once hurts my brain, but I needed absolute temps!)

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As I noted below.

But that actually makes it even more clear that the 2psi pressure difference can be accounted for by simple isometric balancing (ie ball temp changes, volume stays the same).

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(Nitpick Accepted!)

Even if they pump in enough hot air to make it weigh enough to have 12.5psi at a reference temp, there is still a loss of a substantial amount of pressure on a moderately cold field.

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Even weirder..
The link in the National Post story to the Herald story is under the text "Michael J. Naughton ran the math and found that the cold couldn’t account for a two-pound dip in pressure", and the actual link is: http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/01/physicis...

And yet that link resolves as: http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/01/physicis... (note the vanished n_t) and the headline "Physicist: Cold weather could have deflated Patriots’ footballs"

At least that's true at the moment. Conspiracy!

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By 'weather' I assume you mean temperature difference between air output from a compressor vs outside air temp? The ideal gas law can answer this question.

PV=nRT
P = pressure (in pascals)
V = volume (in cubic meters)
n = the amount of gas (in moles)
R = the ideal gas constant
T = tempterature (in degrees Kelvin)

Let's see what change in temperature T is necessary for a change in pressure P of 2 lbs (aka ~13,800 pascals)...

We have beginning and ending states:

P1V = nRT1 - ball when filled

P2V = nRT2 - ball during game

Isolate the constants:

P1/T1 = nRT/V

P2/T2 = nRT/V

Set the two equations equal:

P1/T1 = P2/T2

Isolate the unknown term (original air temp T1):

T1 = T2(P1/P2)

P1/P2 is expressed in pascals. 1 psi = 6895 pascals, so 13.5 psi = 93,000 pascals and 11.5 psi = 79,250 pascals:

P1/P2 = 93,000/79,250 pascals = 1.17

The temperature T2 will be the outside air temp (in Kelvin), 50°F = 283°K so:

T1 = 283°K * 1.17 = 331°K = 136°F

So, the compressed air would have had to been at least 136° Farhenheit. Is this reasonable? Well, compressed air obeys the same ideal gas law we've been playing with - squeeze air into a smaller volume and and it gets hotter. And a quick google indicates that air compressors output air at much higher temps than they take in - so much so (as much as a couple hundred degrees Farhenheit) that large industrial compressors must be fitted with 'aftercoolers'.

So yeah, it seems pretty reasonable to this non-football fan science nerd that the pressure discrepancy can be accounted for by temperature difference.

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I remember NOTHING of chemistry thank you both. It actually makes a lot of sense when its explained. I am still curious as to how the head of a college's physics department got it wrong.

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If you check the link that says weather could NOT explain the underinflation, it leads to the same article as the one where he says whether _could_ have played a role (but he had insufficient data to allow him to know for sure). Googling (by me) does not seem to turn up anything where he first said it could and later clearly said it absolutely could not.

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If you google his name and click on news. You will see two boston herald headlines which go to the same story but differ slightly because one says could and the other says could not. When the article first came out it say could not. If i remember correctly when I first read the article it seemed pretty adamant that weather was not a factor

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I hope you didn't pull all that out of the top of your head..... ;-)

Anyways, none of that means anything if the refs just pick up the balls, give them a squeeze and give them the OK. No pressure checks, no nothing.

To me, this is the easiest and best explanation, and also explains the NFL kinda waffling thru the whole mess. Everybody is imagining this whole formal procedure where the refs accept the balls and painstakingly weigh, measure and check the pressure of each ball in a clean room. I seriously doubt this. So, the refs get caught cutting corners on something nobody really cares about, the whole thing blows up, and the NFL has to wriggle itself out of it. It puts Bill and Tom in a dog and pony show hoping the whole thing goes away.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

But again, thanks for the refresher - I love that stuff.

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If he ain't lying, he ain't trying

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