One thing was made clear in Bill Belichick’s damage-control press conference Saturday morning: The man is not a scientist. But today, the head coach of the New England was a trunk full of contraptions away from becoming the hottest prop comic in the Boston metro area.
Let’s be clear about what we saw Saturday and there can be no doubt that this is a man terrified that the hammer is going to come down on his team, on him and his quarterback specifically, before the Super Bowl next Sunday. And he should be.
To buy some time, and that’s all he’s done here, Belichick brought out his own version of “science,” stretched it out limply before the gathered reporters and then inflated it for all of us witness.
Belichick and his crack team of New England Patriots experts did an experiment, you see. They inflated some footballs to 12.5 PSI, the league minimum and then took them outside for what Belichick called an “extended period of time.”
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Here, Bill, take off your deerstalker hat, remove the calabash pipe from your mouth and tell us what you found.
“In other words they were adjusted to the climatic conditions and also the fact that the footballs which an equilibrium without the rubbing process after that had run its course and the footballs reached an equilibrium, that they were down approximately 1.5 pounds per square inch,” Belichick said. “When we brought the footballs back in after that process and retested them in a controlled environment as we have here, then those measurements rose approximately 0.5 PSI. So the net of 1.5 (PSI) back down 0.5 (PSI) is approximately 1 PSI.”
So Belichick said right there, Saturday, in front of everybody, that the weather made his balls shrink. Specifically, the conditions at Foxboro last Sunday were severe enough to deflate the New England Patriots’ footballs the two PSI that has been reported.
Only here’s the thing, and maybe it’s something Bill should have thought about before beginning his comedy career, the Indianapolis Colts played with 12 footballs last Sunday, too. And theirs were weighed at halftime and after the game and had no PSI change. Weird. And after the officials corrected the Patriots’ PSI at halftime they weighed them again after the game, and I know you’ll be shocked to hear this Bill, but they all weighed the same too. I know, weirder still.
Could it be that Mother Nature herself has a personal beef with the Patriots that she used her natural forces to somehow convince the rest of us that you’ve cheated? What’s her deal?
As this scandal, referred to alternately as DeflateGate and the brilliant Ballghazi, has developed we, along with Bill Belichick it seems, have learned a great deal about the preparation of NFL footballs before the game.
We’ve learned now that all game balls for both teams come to the officials before the game. The officials, as part of their pre-game routine in every single football stadium across the country and sometimes in London, take an electronic pressure gauge to all the footballs, checking to see if the pressure is between 12.5 and 13.5 PSI. If it is not, the officials then add pressure.
Our good friend Bill, in the middle of his first hilarious set today, let us in on the fact that he knows this too. And maybe, just maybe it wasn’t his team that was cheating, but in fact those dastardly refs that screwed up all 12 of his footballs while simultaneously not doing anything wrong with the Colts’ footballs!
“When the footballs are delivered to the officials’ locker room, the officials were asked to inflate them to 12.5 PSI,” Belichick said. “What exactly they did, I don’t know.”
And to think they almost got away with it, the cads.
It’s ironic that Bill Belichick wanted to throw down some “science” Saturday because at roughly the same time as his press conference was happening, real SCIENCE showed up.
Warren Sharp, a football data analyst, actually ran the numbers, probabilities and statistics of the Patriots’ fumbles in comparison with other teams in the NFL. One of the things we’ve learned while discussing under-inflated footballs is not only are they easier to throw and catch, but if you’re to believe every single Hall of Fame football player that’s talked about it, harder to fumble too.
So Sharp looked at that specifically. He looked at the Patriots. He looked at everybody else. What did he find?
“The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible.”
Sharp concludes after compiling all the data that, “This is an extremely abnormal occurrence and is not simply random fluctuation.”
In other words, cheating.
Sharp shared his data with the NFLProject.com and the scientist there said that the chances of the Patriots’ lack of fumbles being just luck or chance have a probability of 0.0000616 percent. That’s 1 in 6,160,000 and the Patriots are beating those odds in every single game?
The hammer that Belichick tried so hard to stave off Saturday is coming, there can be little doubt. Roger Goodell is a liar and a coward and, in this circumstance, that actually works against Belichick, Brady and the Patriots. They are going down. All Belichick can do now is cause enough of a delay that he can coach in the Super Bowl with Brady as his quarterback.
For the NFL’s sake and for Goodell to begin rebuilding any semblance of a reputation, Belichick should fail. He and Tom Brady should both watch the Patriots get blown out in the Super Bowl on Feb. 1 on their couches just like the rest of us.
