Even if Bill Belichick thought Tom Brady was lying about not being involved in Deflategate, the New England Patriots sure went to a lot of trouble to back his controversial quarterback.
NESN.com reported that a professor corroborated Belichick's statements in January that the Patriots' rubbing of the footballs artificially raises the air pressure in the football.
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"Now, we all know that air pressure is a function of the atmospheric conditions," Belichick said during his January press conference, following the revelation that the Patriots balls were underinflated during the first half of their AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts. "It's a function of that. If there's activity in the football relative to the rubbing process, I think that explains why when we gave them to the officials and the officials put it at, let's say 12.5, if that's in fact what they did, that once the football reached its equilibrium state, it probably was closer to 11.5."
University of Massachusetts-Lowell professor David Willis said that does happen when a football is rubbed for significant amount of time.
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"If you took this football and started rubbing it, your hand would actually get warm," Willis said during an on-camera interview with NESN. "And that warmth is actually going into the football, and the ideal gas wall would actually expand. As the temperature of the skin of the football increases, that heat is also going into the ball. ... The act of rubbing the ball causes the pressure of the ball to increase artificially."
Willis said part of the Wells investigation included simulating a rubbing of the balls and found that the balls artificially expanded about 0.7 psi.
The problem with Belichick's theory, Willis said, is that the ball returns to its equilibrium or pre-rubbed state quickly.
"In the Wells report, the decay (the contraction after the rubbing wears off) happened in the order of minutes, not hours," Willis said, "so something around 15 minutes."
In other words, even if the balls got to the officials quickly, the psi would not have remained one pound underinflated. See the Willis interview here.
But at least Belichick came up with a more plausible explanation than the Patriots' claim that "deflator" that was used in the text messages of the Pats' equipment managers involved in the illegal activity meant "losing weight."
How do you think Patriots coach Bill Belichick discovered that rubbing footballs artificially inflated the psi in footballs? Comment below or tell us @SportsWN.
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