Posted on 01/23/2015 1:50:05 PM PST by Colofornian
Under his oversized ski cap, Tom Brady could not hide from the fact he was convicting himself in the court of public opinion. The quarterback of the New England Patriots admitted that footballs pumped up to 12.5 pounds per square inch are "a perfect fit for me," yet swore he did not notice a difference in the AFC Championship Game when most of the balls had significantly less pressure.
Brady's story Thursday was harder to believe than the story of the 199th pick in the NFL draft becoming one of the greatest players of all time...
"I would never do anything outside of the rules of play," Brady said.
But his own words told a different tale, and as soon as he was done talking, a 17-year veteran of the quarterback position, Mark Brunell, said on ESPN that he was among those who didn't believe Brady. Earlier Thursday, even before Bill Belichick seemed to be throwing his franchise player under a triple-decker bus in his own news conference, Hall of Famer Troy Aikman said on a Dallas radio station the following:
"It's obvious that Tom Brady had something to do with this."...
(Excerpt) Read more at espn.go.com ...
Tell them there’s so much money in each NFL game it’s surprising the rules committee hasn’t instituted random/commercial break testing long ago. Unless the players, owners and refs were generally all down with it per quarterback/home field preference.
Freegards
I think you are on the right track. In the overall game the inflation of the football really doesn’t make a great deal of difference if any at all. I suspect that the refs know this and are willing to expand the written rules to accommodate individual preferences by the QB’s.
As for the reasons why the footballs are not checked, my guess is that the same forces that persuaded the rules committee to allow teams to use their own footballs are at work.
I change the grips on my golf clubs every once in a while and while I have my preferences for size and feel, at the end of a round the score is pretty much the same.
Well, whether it makes a big difference or not, there could just be wink-wink nod say-no-more between teams. And the refs won’t get interested unless someone complains. If every quarterback has their own sometimes wildly different preference, it could just be every team is scared to ask the refs to check because they know the other team will ask in retaliation back at them. That happens in baseball when someone complains to an ump about loaded or scuffed balls, sometimes they know something is up but they probably have a pitcher on their team that does the same thing.
It would be interesting to know exactly how this came to the attention to the refs.
Freegards
Liberal you, cheater.
Agreed!
I was tired and being lazy.
Yes, those are production tolerances. Frankly, as written, that’s what the 12.5-13.5 PSI would be too. I’m guessing there’s an extension of that somewhere.
More likely, they understand the principles, but can’t vouch for any specific thing to have definitively been what happened. That would be just going down the rabbit hole. They don’t have the luxury of not being precisely correct. Look at the crazy already going around.
That was the start of the third quarter. The kicking balls are marked.
As for pros touching the ball discerning? Many have said they can’t when up in those ranges, even when specifically trying and doing non-QB things with the ball to tell. D’Qwan Jackson, the Colt defender who intercepted the ball and was credited in the media as kicking off all this has said he didn’t notice any difference.
A volley ball is 4.5 PSI which is fairly soft, a basketball is 8 PSI which is pretty stiff. An NFL football is 13. From feeling with a hand, anything over 9-10 is just hard.
If anything more serious occurs like a higher fine, lost pick, and/or suspension, we’ll know for sure that it was all on the Pats.
Teams and players have been fined/penalized before over dumbassery on the part of NFL operations .
I hope we can look for some creative stuff.
Only if 1) the 11/12 report is accurate, and 2) that all the balls were treated the same at all points in time. You should see a correlation in balls that were treated the same, with the same background.
That seems the most likely answer so far, without invoking invisible Ninja ball attendants.
Perhaps a few thousand people will have learned some basic physics and math out of all this.
Why don't we just take Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and strap them to an electric chair and get it over with.
Some Jets fan can pull the switch.
I find it highly implausible that they’d have 11 of 12 at the very bottom of the range for the pats, but have 12 of 12 at the very highest edge of the range for the colts.
Aaron Rogers has said that some of the refs will even add a little more to his balls on their own because they know he likes them extra hard. It’s unclear whether he means over the guidelines even if that was a clear inference from context...but that’s another argument.
I read that to mean reinflated.
Unless the players, owners and refs were generally all down with it per quarterback/home field preference.
Of course now there’s a hysterical uninformed national tirade going on, so they might respond just about any old way.
12 of 12 ‘changed’
Well, whether it makes a big difference or not, there could just be wink-wink nod say-no-more between teams.
Or a “good enough” standard which doesn’t extend to an industrial QA level of interest. Why bother to cut logs to the micron for shipping?
In this case, the balls need to be inflated enough to be solid, and not so overinflated that they will be permenantly deformed, fail, or not be cushioned if someone falls on it. 12.5-13.5 PSI is really just the manufacturing standards of the bladder inside the football. It’s still perfectly functional at 10.
“In this case, the balls need to be inflated enough to be solid, and not so overinflated that they will be permenantly deformed, fail, or not be cushioned if someone falls on it. 12.5-13.5 PSI is really just the manufacturing standards of the bladder inside the football. “
1. The 12.5 to 13.5 psig IS a rule. Not a manufacturing standard.
2. Each ball is inflated to 100 psig prior to leaving factory inorder to permanently ‘deform’ the ball.
The 12.5 to 13.5 psig IS a rule. Not a manufacturing standard.
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