From (
How low will game balls' psi drop in frigid Seahawks-Vikes game?):
Ideal Gas Law causes the air pressure of a football to decrease in colder weather, a physics lesson the NFL inadvertently learned/taught last year when it punished the
New England Patriotsafter the league claimed two staffers tampered with the game balls in the AFC championship game.
The franchise countered that the deflation of the balls was an act of nature, not subterfuge.
You were no doubt bored with the back-and-forth a long time ago.
Forget deflate-gate, Seattle is visiting Minnesota on Sunday afternoon and the weather forecast calls for temperatures to hover around zero. If so, it could rank as one of the 10 coldest games in NFL history. The wind chill is expected to hit between minus-15 and minus-20.
This could deliver the mother of all psi level drops.
The NFL requires balls to be inflated between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. The NFL's own internal investigation said footballs on the day of the AFC championship game in Foxborough, with temperatures in the low 50s, could naturally reach 11.32 psi. The lowest-recorded Pats football was either 10.5 or 10.9 depending on the measuring gauge used.
So how low should the air pressure go Sunday in the brutal chill of Minneapolis?
Try about 9.0 psi. Maybe even into the 8s.
"Ignoring the wind chill (meaning the following is a conservative estimate, meaning the wind chill could make the on-field ball pressure even lower), the on-field ball pressure will be about 9 psig (assuming it was pressurized to 12.5 psig at 70F and measured on-field at 0F)," Dr. Michael Naughton, the chair of the physics department at Boston College wrote to Yahoo Sports.
That's a low-pressure ball....
"The pressure will, unambiguously, drop several psi," Naughton wrote. "The game will be played with these 'illegal' balls."
Is there anyway to inflate the balls so much pregame that they can withstand the bitter cold and get to the NFL's preferred 12.5-13.5 psi?
"The only way to assure a game under such conditions is pressurize them to between 16.7 and 17.8 psig pregame," Naughton wrote.
Or in the parlance of Jim McNally … "a [expletive] balloon.""
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Of course the NFL won't test the balls this weekend in Minnesota, will they? Because what will they do when they find both teams playing with footballs at 2-3 psi below the legal limit?
At what point will EVERYONE just finally say, you know what, this whole thing is just a colossal dump truck full of crap?
