CAVEAT: The author of this little blog post is a long suffering fan of the Minnesota Vikings, not the New England Patriots. The author is not a particular fan of Bill Belichick either. The author gives no crap personally about neither the team nor the coach.

This whole deflate-gate thing hurts my brain. When I see people say that the Patriots should be disqualified from the Super Bowl I want to break my own nose. When I read a comment like "Bill Belichick should be banned from coaching," I want to tear my eyelids off.

Tom Brady is one of the three or four greatest quarterbacks in history. To think that he would require the slightly significant help of a slightly deflated ball to beat the Indianapolis Colts is not only laughable, it's an insult to common sense.

From the beginning of this doltish national story I could only think of one thing: the tires on my truck.

Twice this winter my dash has sounded an alarm that suddenly all four of my tires are under-inflated. When I stopped and checked they were all three to five pounds per square inch (PSI) low on air. Both of these incidents of a low tire alarm coincided with a sudden drop in temperature when my truck sat outside.

The average Internet noise maker keeps screaming "How could 11 of 12 balls all be under-inflated?" That answer is simple. All of the balls were all outside in the cold.

I am not an authority on science, but I do remember my high school physical science class enough to recall that all things contract or get smaller when they get colder. When things get warmer they expand. The only exception to this in nature is water. Water expands when it freezes. But air contracts. And so does the air inside a football.

Then, looking for ammunition without having to spend money on my own experiment on a regulation NFL football, I searched on Youtube for "football cold deflation." What did I find but a video from the show Sports Science on ESPN entitled "Sport Science: Cold Weather." The video, dated December 20, 2010, explained how football players bodies react to playing in cold weather. They also explain what happens to the ball in cold weather. The portion about the ball starts at the 1:46 mark.

From the Sports Science video:

"...A football exposed to ten degree temperatures for an hour, actually got slightly smaller. Its diameter shrank five hundredths of an inch. And it's air pressure was reduced by over twenty percent."

The onscreen graphic showed the ball's pressure dropping from the maximum allowed pressure of 13.5 PSI to 11 PSI. By my math that is 18.5% and not a drop of over 20%, but it is a drop of 2.5 PSI. The temperature in Boston was in the 40's throughout the game, not the frigid 10 degrees as tested in the video. But 47 is a lot colder than 72 or whatever the temperature was in the room where the balls were inflated. Ask any guy, that's enough of a difference in temperature to cause shrinkage!

If this came up with Peyton Manning when he was with the Colts and the highly respected Tony Dungy was the coach, the media -- especially in Indianapolis where this steamy pile originated -- would have never run with the story like they have. But because of "Spy-gate" and the grumpy Belichick being involved it exploded.

Did Tom Brady or Bill Belichick tell the equipment manager or the ball boys to deflate the balls? I really doubt it. Nearly every NFL quarterback messes with the balls prior to the game. And not one current or former quarterback is saying that the under-inflated balls were a big deal. I even heard Trent Dilfer say on ESPN Radio this week that an under-inflated ball may be easier to grip but is "harder to throw."

I think the balls were probably inflated to the low end of the specification, and maybe even slightly under, and when they were taken into the New England cold, the balls shrank a little. But what do I know? I'm just a guy whose tires go flat in the winter without the help of a ball boy.

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