So unless you have managed to avoid the television, internet and radio this week (or have been hibernating with a nice bear family this winter), we imagine all of you have heard about this Deflate-gate thing.
Now this isn’t going to be a story by Patriots fans (which we are) defending their beloved team, because there’s no reason to add our two cents to the equation when everyone, their grandmother, their brother and unborn children have weighed in on the topic. We like to set the trends, not follow them.
Instead, we wanted to feel what this controversy was all about. So we called upon Dave Palisi, owner of Capital Sporting Goods on North State Street, to help us out. We wanted to actually hold a football, inflated to the letter of the NFL law, and compare it to what the Patriots supposedly had theirs set at in the AFC championship game.
“It’s not an issue ’cause they all do it,” Palisi said. “They all like their ball a certain way.”
Palisi first let us feel a ball – actually it was a Wilson NCAA 1001 football, so not the same as the pros, but a football nonetheless – that was inflated to seven pounds per square inch, and you could tell there wasn’t quite enough air, although it was still pretty solid. Then he jacked it up to 12.5, the minimum for footballs used in an NFL game. It was rock hard and not something we’d want to catch on a consistent basis from Tom Brady. But when Palisi dropped it back down to 10.5 pounds per square inch (where the Patriots reportedly had them), we sure wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if we didn’t see the gauge drop in front of our very eyes.
“Is it going to be the difference in a 45-7 game?” Palisi asked. Hint: The answer is no.
The only way we could tell the difference was by digging in our fingers for a good squeeze, and we all know that doesn’t happen on the football field. And for the record, if we had three balls placed in front of us – one over inflated, one under inflated and another just right – we would have never known which was which.
“They can tell, but you and I can’t,” Palisi said of those who handle footballs on an everyday basis – like officials.
So there you have our scientific experiment of the week, and proof that this whole thing is a bunch of (insert naughty word).
