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PHOENIX -- The 108 official Super Bowl XLIX footballs will receive additional security this weekend amid an ongoing NFL investigation into the inflation of game balls in the AFC Championship Game, vice president of officiating Dean Blandino said Thursday."There will be some added security just because of the environment we're in for this game," Blandino said during a football operations news conference at the Phoenix Convention Center. ESPN.com reported last week that, per longstanding NFL policy, an independent set of equipment managers and ball attendants will handle pregame preparation of game balls. This year, Chicago Bears equipment manager Tony Medlin...

....Obama weighed into the ‘deflategate’ controversy by cracking a few jokes ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl. Speaking at the annual House Democratic retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday, Obama called on any supporters of the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks to keep it clean.....

OK!!! It's time to start an official (semi) Freerepublic superbowl prediction thread! My prediction... 27-17 Seattle!!

Health officials in Arizona, host state of Sunday's Super Bowl, have asked people who may have been exposed to measles to isolate themselves ... Seven cases have been confirmed and 1,000 people across three counties may have been exposed .. Two of the seven confirmed cases are in Maricopa County, which is hosting the NFL championship game, the county's health department confirmed Tuesday. Because the highly contagious virus can linger in the air for two hours, health officials have asked those who may have been exposed to avoid doctors' offices, emergency rooms or urgent-care centers

Maybe the smoking gun isn’t in a bathroom at Gillette Stadium. Maybe it’s in the laptop of a civil engineer in Washington, D.C. One of the strangest twists in the already strange saga of deflate-gate is the sudden star turn of a man who runs a gambling website when he’s not doing his day job. Warren Sharp is a 36-year-old dad who loves numbers and algorithms, and decided to apply some statistics to the Patriots when he heard about the football deflation investigation. What he found sent ripples through the sports world and got a few other statisticians pretty upset....

"What do you think you missed not having a dad around?" Marshawn Lynch, the grumpy, often-fined National Football League star for the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, was asked that question. Lynch, raised on the mean streets of Oakland, California, by a single mother, said: "Nothing. My mama played both parts." When asked, however, why he finds it difficult to "trust" people, Lynch tells a story about his father: "I think it started earlier, when Mom would (take me over to my dad's) house. And when I get there, my dad like, 'Oh, OK, I be right back,' and...

The folks up at our sister station WBLM in Portland have created their own DeflateGate anthem. We wanted to share it with you and honor our New England Patriots.

BOSTON (CBS) — You may have noticed that Tom Brady didn’t look himself at Tuesday’s Media Day. No, it wasn’t his bed head. And it wasn’t from a lack of sleep thanks to an early morning fire alarm at the team’s hotel. As he prepares for the biggest game of the season, the Patriots quarterback is battling a cold. And if you thought he looked rough on Tuesday, he looked a bit worse on Wednesday as he addressed the media at the team hotel in Chandler, Arizona. “It’s been lingering,” Brady told reporters as he held court for nearly 45...

Can Teddy Bear the Porcupine accurately predict the winner of the Super Bowl for the FOURTH year in a row? Don't ever underestimate the power of po'pine prognostication! See who he picks to win Super Bowl XLIX (2015). Copyright 2015, Zooniversity LLC. Online sites are welcome to link to this address or embed with Google ads intact (no ad blocking). FILE COPYING IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WITHO

Deflategate has taken another twist. FOX Sports has learned that the NFL has zeroed in on a New England Patriots locker-room attendant in connection with the scandal of improperly inflated footballs used in the AFC championship game against Indianapolis. The person of interest was already interviewed by the league. The NFL is trying to determine whether any wrongdoing by this individual occurred, sources tell FOX Sports. There is surveillance video showing the attendant taking the footballs from the official's locker room into another room at Gillette Stadium before bringing them out to the field, sources tell FOX Sports.

....the mayor of Glendale, Arizona - home to Super Bowl XLIX - is questioning the money-making potential of this year's big game, CBS News' David Begnaud reports. "I think if you looked in the till at the end of the day, I think you'll have less money in it than came in," said Glendale Mayor Jerry Weiers. Weiers suspects that when the sun sets on Super Bowl XLIX, the only real loser may be his city. "I'm sure that we're going to spend $3 million," Weiers said. "I would hope, in tax revenues, that we can actually account for well...

But what has the NFL really found? As one league source has explained it to PFT, the football intercepted by Colts linebacker D’Qwell Jackson was roughly two pounds under the 12.5 PSI minimum. The other 10 balls that reportedly were two pounds under may have been, as the source explained it, closer to one pound below 12.5 PSI.

Saturday Night Live got its hands on Bill Belichick’s and Tom Brady’s balls Saturday night, spoofing the prickly pair with a mock press conference that transitioned into a raucous scene from “A Few Good Men.”

Full title: TV News Priorities: 68 Minutes for Under-Inflated Footballs, Mere Seconds for Obama's Release of Terrorists The three major networks have, so far, devoted a staggering 67 minutes and 49 seconds to obsessing over every aspect of whether the New England Patriots cheated in their AFC championship win on Sunday. Yet, only ABC allowed a scant 34 seconds to the Obama administration's release of five terrorists out of Guantanamo Bay and back to areas connected with extremist violence. The contrast is 120-to-1. NBC was, by far, the most lopsided in terms of journalistic priorities. From Monday through early Thursday,...

In the year of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson and Greg Hardy, they've somehow managed to trump serious cases of domestic abuse by blowing a silly, inane, moronic controversy over the inflation of game balls into a national story that gets more sublime and ridiculous by the day. The league didn't take their time and do due diligence on what really mattered in the Ray Rice case, and delivered a hasty judgment that Commissioner Roger Goodell admitted was ill-conceived. Now, they're taking their sweet time to decide who may have taken too much air out of the balls, a violation that...

Another Bad Lip Reading For The Super Bowl

The name on the card that night in May seemed to draw as much anxiety as it did excitement. Johnny Manziel, Quarterback, Texas A&M. The former Heisman Trophy winner had been passed over 21 times, prompting a text from Manziel to then-Browns quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains that he wanted to "wreck this league" in Cleveland. The words were actually more R-rated, but the implication was clear. Twitter erupted at the selection. A Cleveland radio host cheered and screamed openly on air. Manziel gave his "money" sign as he walked onstage to greet Roger Goodell. By season's end, cheering had turned...

...One can clearly see the Patriots, visually, are off the chart. There is no other team even close to being near to their rate of 187 offensive plays per fumble lost. The league average is 105 plays per fumble lost. Most teams are within 21 plays of that number. I spoke with a data scientist whom I know from work on NFLproject.com and sent him the data. He said: Based on the assumption that fumbles per play follow a normal distribution, you’d expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten over this period, once...

Unless you've been living under several rocks, you've heard by now that the New England Patriots were investigated for under-inflating the footballs used during the first half of their 45-7 victory in the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. The whole matter has come to be known as "Deflategate" or "Ballghazi," and has dominated the national news this past week.In response to all of this, Rep. Todd Young (R-IN), a Colts fan, published a "Who said it?" quiz on his official website comparing the rhetoric used in DeflateGate with the White House's official response to several scandals during the...

Patriots defenders constantly make the point that deflated balls were not a big deal last Sunday, because the Pats won so convincingly over Indy. Maybe. But what about the Ravens game a week earlier? That one WAS close - 35-31. Does anyone really think the Pats weren't pulling their under-inflation tricks then, that it just started last week? Other teams raised the issue back in November, so it's reasonable to assume it's been going on since at least then.