Interesting Tidbit from Albert Breer about the Wells' Investigation Today (4/10)

SlowGettingUp said:

Well it's ambiguous whether "2 pounds under" means "2 pounds under nominal" or "2 pounds under minimum." If it's the latter, we still might need to find half a pound someplace. The fact that the one ball was apparently lower than the others supports some air having been let out (quite possibly unintentionally) during gauging.

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True. Everything about news reports is - AT BEST - ambiguous.

These are the things that we can know for sure from that report:

1. The guy that filed it is pretty clueless about measurements. No one who is really competent would have said "2 pounds" instead of "2 psi".
2. The guy is sloppy, by virtue of not saying "below WHAT". (nominal or minimum)

ALL of the reporting on this issue (and, IMHO, on every issue) is massively suspect.

So my approach is to (mostly) ignore the reporting, and stick with the science/engineering.

What I DO know about footballs (not just theory, but experimentation too) is the following:

1. Any ball, EVERY ball, filled to 12.5 psig @ 75°F, and then exposed to 50°F air & 47°F water (1 minute water dunk, dry off, 9 minute cold air) for 70 minutes will record an internal pressure of about 11.0 psig.
2. The only temperature that plays any role in determining the pressure of the air inside the ball is ... the temperature of the air inside the ball. This is obvious, once you think about it. You can NOT use the external air temperature to predict the pressure inside the ball, unless the ball has equilibrated to the external air for a LONG time. And NOBODY measures the temperature of the air inside the balls at this time.
   
3. The air inside a warm, dry ball cools down relatively quickly when exposed to cold, wet conditions. This is principally because water has a much higher heat capacity than air does, and a drenching rain keeps exposing the outside of the ball to new, cold water. (The thin layer of water on the surface of the ball doesn't heat up.) And because the leather absorbs the cold water into itself.
   
4. The air inside a cold, wet ball brought into a warm dry room takes many, many hours to warm up. For all the reasons inverse to those listed in 3 above. The football is a damn good thermos, surrounded by a dense layer of cold water (in the leather), and the air doesn't transport heat to the surface of the football very quickly. (Not nearly as fast as a dousing cold water will take it away.) For comparison, if they had doused the outside of the ball with warm, room temperature water, THEN it would have warmed up almost as fast as the cold water cooled it off.

But from 1. above, it is easy to make several inviolate predictions:

1. Every single football ever used by the NFL (or college, high school, Pop Warner, etc) behaves exactly as described in 1. above, if exposed to those temperatures & pressures.
2. The fact that a football loses pressure in cold water is surprising to many people. The precise AMOUNT of pressure that it loses is surprising to LOTS of people. Including NFL players, league officials, referees, etc.
3. Nobody in the Pats organization knew how to calculate the expected pressure drop. Nobody in the press knew how to do it. And therefore everyone was astonished at the expected number. Whether that number was 11.0 psi or 10.5 psi.
4. All the reports of some balls having some pressure changes, while other balls have different ones is utter nonsense. (except in the case of a ball springing a leak, which no data supports.)

So, I'll talk about what footballs must do when exposed to temp differences. This has absolutely zero dependency on anything that happened during the Pats/Colts game. It has zero dependency on all the confusing & confused news reports. That makes it simple & reliable.

The simple fact is that the NFL had (prior to this incident) very close to zero knowledge about the interaction between pressure & temperature inside footballs. This is indisputable, simply by reading their pressure inspection procedures.

And I'll go with Occam's Razor on this issue. The simplest explanation ...

Which is simpler?

1. The temperature difference is responsible for 1.5 psi pressure drop & there is a someone in the Pats organization that is letting 0.5 psi out of every ball, or
2. The temperature difference is responsible for 1.5 psi pressure drop & the person making the statement did not know that TB likes his footballs set to 0.5 psi under the nominal. (A fact that he did not reveal until 2 days AFTER the quote came out.)

Obviously, we want to know the answer to this question. Obviously, we'd like to ask the person that reported it, but he just quoted someone else. I want to go to the source, the person who took the measurement. I simply do not trust any reporters to get any facts correct.

So, this is a question that I'd like answered by the Well report. There are several others.

I've started a thread listing the questions that I'd like answered.
Any suggestions you'd have would be very welcome.

If the Patriots had 12 balls in use obviously all 12 would be affected by the weather but wouldn't the degree vary depending on how much they were used? Some of the balls probably just sat in the bag for the entire half. Wouldn't it make sense then that those balls would have then not lost as much internal pressure, supporting Florio's report about the varying PSI levels?

Again, I'll say that use has a minimal effect and in any case would be quite variable depending on use and the football itself, e.g. previously unknown mfg defects. Ignored for this situation.

VectorPrime said:

If the Patriots had 12 balls in use obviously all 12 would be affected by the weather but wouldn't the degree vary depending on how much they were used? Some of the balls probably just sat in the bag for the entire half. Wouldn't it make sense then that those balls would have then not lost as much internal pressure, supporting Florio's report about the varying PSI levels?

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Did not Blount toss a ball into the stands in the 1st quarter after a TD? If so and there were 12 balls after this then one of them was probably the unapproved ball that an official put in to cover for the stolen one which was later put back. 12 game balls, 1 in stands, 11 low, 1 of the 11 way low. It could also be that the way low one was the unapproved ball which was not set or checked by the reffs too.

tom.kordis said:

I don't get this.

As I understand it, the dew point is the temperature at which vapor water & liquid water are at equilibrium. And when the temp drops to the dew point, fog forms.

During the game, there was rain, but very clearly no fog.

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As I understand it and I may be wrong, the dew point is where the water evaporates to and draws the temperature down to that level. This is why the the PSI drops below what one would expect based just on temperature when the ball is wet.

Interesting. I don't know the right answer.
I do know that water transports heat faster than air so it reaches equilibrium faster than a dry ball.
I'm assuming that air temp and rain temp are pretty much equal. Rain COULD be colder in the fall having come from a few thousand feet up,

Dr Pain said:

As I understand it and I may be wrong, the dew point is where the water evaporates to and draws the temperature down to that level.

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I don't believe that is quite correct. While it is true that evaporation cannot cool things to a temperature less than the due point temperature, evaporation will not generally be able to cool something all the way down to the dew point temperature.

What you can say is that as long as the DP temp is below the air temp, the evaporation will cool things to less than air temp but no less than DP temp. So it'll generally be somewhere in between. Which is nonetheless cooler than the air temp.

Here's my issue.
In rain, the air is at NEAR, but not quite, 100% humidity.
If it is really 100% humidity, there should be fog.

At 100% humidity, there is essentially zero evaporation. (Statistical mechanics says that there is a tiny amount.)
At near 100% humidity, there is negligible evaporation.

The only time that evaporation might play a role is the very few seconds that a ball is in flight (a pass or punt) due to the relative wind across the ball, but this is so short a duration that it has to be insignificant. I don't believe that the wind was very strong at all during the game (<5 mph).

Once the external surface of the ball has cooled down to within a few degrees of the ambient air, then convection & conduction to air become irrelevant.

Conduction to water is the principle heat transport mechanism. You have conduction to a stationary layer of water (for wet balls in a bag) & conduction to a constantly replaced, cold layer of water (for balls while exposed to the rain). Once the balls get wet, there is really no way to dry them off for several hours. The water gets into the leather.

If a ball stayed relatively dry in the bag in which the ball boys keep them, then the cooling RATE could be lower than balls exposed to the rain. But this doesn't seem likely to me. Just reaching in & removing or replacing a ball seems likely to get all the balls at least a little wet. At least, this has been my experience with gear in bags, when kayaking or camping in the rain.

Remember also that just getting the balls wet reduced the pressure by around 0.3 psi in the HeadSmart test.

So, I think that it's possible that, if some balls were never used, but kept relatively dry in the ball bag, they might be, say 0.3 - 0.4 psi higher pressure than balls exposed to the rain.

It's just my guess, but I doubt that "being unused in the bag" led to any significant difference in pressures.

I think that the ball boys might subvert this effect by intentionally trying to pull out the driest ball in the bag at each opportunity, thinking that "the driest ball is the best ball to use".

Dr Pain said:

Did not Blount toss a ball into the stands in the 1st quarter after a TD? If so and there were 12 balls after this then one of them was probably the unapproved ball that an official put in to cover for the stolen one which was later put back. 12 game balls, 1 in stands, 11 low, 1 of the 11 way low. It could also be that the way low one was the unapproved ball which was not set or checked by the reffs too.

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I had read about Blount throwing a ball into the stands, and even (embarrassingly) repeated that as a fact. But I just went back & rewatched the game with this in mind. He did NOT do so when he scored with 10:15 to go in the 1st qtr. He plowed into the end zone in a giant scrum. He didn't even come out of the pile with the ball, & I saw no evidence of anyone else throwing the ball.

The second touchdown, at 1:20 left in 1st qtr, might explain it, tho. A pass to Devlin, who broke a tackle & with great 2nd effort, got into the end zone for is FIRST CAREER touchdown reception. Devlin had a Death-Grip on the football as he walked to the side lines. I bet that this one went into his "save this one for me" stash.

I wonder if it also might be the one intercepted by D'quell Jackson. If he took it out of the game, perhaps the refs wouldn't let it be introduced back into the mix.

Gostowski's kick at 0:09 hit the net. It didn't go into the stands.

Next touch down was Nate Solder's TD. But he didn't have the ball after the celebration. He might have tracked it down for a souvenir, but I didn't see any evidence of that.

I think I found it. Gronk spike. At 3:19 of 3rd quarter, after catching TD pass. Ball goes flying into the crowd.

At 2:08, Blount scores again from 13 yards out, then casually drops ball behind him before going to pose with the Minutemen, again.

Blount's 3rd touchdown, with 10:10 left in 4th, 2 yards up the middle. Again, he just drops the ball. No theatrics.

I think that the only one unaccounted for is the Gronk spike.

But, IF (and it's a big "if") the report is correct, then they had to grab the balls back from Devlin & Solder (if my reading of their "this goes into my trophy case" body language is correct), AND the one intercepted by Jackson.

tom.kordis said:

I had read about Blount throwing a ball into the stands, and even (embarrassingly) repeated that as a fact. But I just went back & rewatched the game with this in mind. He did NOT do so when he scored with 10:15 to go in the 1st qtr. He plowed into the end zone in a giant scrum. He didn't even come out of the pile with the ball, & I saw no evidence of anyone else throwing the ball.

The second touchdown, at 1:20 left in 1st qtr, might explain it, tho. A pass to Devlin, who broke a tackle & with great 2nd effort, got into the end zone for is FIRST CAREER touchdown reception. Devlin had a Death-Grip on the football as he walked to the side lines. I bet that this one went into his "save this one for me" stash.

I wonder if it also might be the one intercepted by D'quell Jackson. If he took it out of the game, perhaps the refs wouldn't let it be introduced back into the mix.

Gostowski's kick at 0:09 hit the net. It didn't go into the stands.

Next touch down was Nate Solder's TD. But he didn't have the ball after the celebration. He might have tracked it down for a souvenir, but I didn't see any evidence of that.

I think I found it. Gronk spike. At 3:19 of 3rd quarter, after catching TD pass. Ball goes flying into the crowd.

At 2:08, Blount scores again from 13 yards out, then casually drops ball behind him before going to pose with the Minutemen, again.

Blount's 3rd touchdown, with 10:10 left in 4th, 2 yards up the middle. Again, he just drops the ball. No theatrics.

I think that the only one unaccounted for is the Gronk spike.

But, IF (and it's a big "if") the report is correct, then they had to grab the balls back from Devlin & Solder (if my reading of their "this goes into my trophy case" body language is correct), AND the one intercepted by Jackson.

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Thanks, Was not 100% sure, heard it but was not sure.

I can't help buy wonder if this all could have been avoided if Brady hadn't thrown that bonehead interception, giving the Colts the ability to f**k with the ball on the sidelines. They would have probably screwed us with something else though.

tom.kordis said:

I had read about Blount throwing a ball into the stands, and even (embarrassingly) repeated that as a fact. But I just went back & rewatched the game with this in mind. He did NOT do so when he scored with 10:15 to go in the 1st qtr. He plowed into the end zone in a giant scrum. He didn't even come out of the pile with the ball, & I saw no evidence of anyone else throwing the ball.

The second touchdown, at 1:20 left in 1st qtr, might explain it, tho. A pass to Devlin, who broke a tackle & with great 2nd effort, got into the end zone for is FIRST CAREER touchdown reception. Devlin had a Death-Grip on the football as he walked to the side lines. I bet that this one went into his "save this one for me" stash.

I wonder if it also might be the one intercepted by D'quell Jackson. If he took it out of the game, perhaps the refs wouldn't let it be introduced back into the mix.

Gostowski's kick at 0:09 hit the net. It didn't go into the stands.

Next touch down was Nate Solder's TD. But he didn't have the ball after the celebration. He might have tracked it down for a souvenir, but I didn't see any evidence of that.

I think I found it. Gronk spike. At 3:19 of 3rd quarter, after catching TD pass. Ball goes flying into the crowd.

At 2:08, Blount scores again from 13 yards out, then casually drops ball behind him before going to pose with the Minutemen, again.

Blount's 3rd touchdown, with 10:10 left in 4th, 2 yards up the middle. Again, he just drops the ball. No theatrics.

I think that the only one unaccounted for is the Gronk spike.

But, IF (and it's a big "if") the report is correct, then they had to grab the balls back from Devlin & Solder (if my reading of their "this goes into my trophy case" body language is correct), AND the one intercepted by Jackson.

Click to expand...

The way I understand it they used all the balls in a rotation taking the wet balls and wiping them down and letting them dry off a bit before reintroducing them into the game. I guess when they tested they would all be close in PSI depending on how wet it was.
Fog is formed when the temperature and dew point is the same causing any moisture in the air to condense.