Scuffing a ball is not against the rules. Never has been.
Never said it was. My point was it’s easy to do...just pay the ball boy to do it.
No actually it has been. At that point in SB history they used balls from the factory that went straight to the officials and teams weren’t allowed to modify them. The fact that Johnson had to bribe somebody to do it shows it was very much against the rules, if it was allowed he’d have done it himself. Teams modifying balls is relatively recent change that Peyton Manning and other campaigned for.