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The incident, besides reviving those old “Belicheat” cliches from SpyGate, ripped the cover off a part of the game that many fans never think about: the journey of a football from approval to sideline. NFL footballs, according to the rule book, must be inflated with 12.5-13.5 pounds per square inch. Each team brings a number of balls to game officials, who approve them and mark them 135 minutes before game time. The footballs eventually are returned to each team, and each side uses its own set of balls when it is on offense. The NFL won’t be pulling the Patriots out of the Super Bowl. If it determines that they acted deliberately, a fine and/or loss of draft picks would be the likely punishment. But in a multi-billion-dollar business, this is either a really bad way to go about things or it’s a nonchalance, an arrogant shrug that says “everybody does it” and pays no mind to the possibility that it taints all those gaudy stats offenses have put up the last decade. So one of the first questions Goodell must ask as the NFL probes DeflateGate is: how pervasive is this?