Mystery solved?
Inflate them with nitrogen like they do race tires.
Someone said the cold-temperature issue had already been checked.
If the balls had been inflated at 20°C and then used at 5°C, the difference in pressure would have been less than 15/273 (also known as 5.5%). That’s not accounting for moisture condensation, which I doubt would make much of a difference.
I believe the balls used by the Colts act as controls. 12 out of 12 of the Colts balls were within the specified PSI. For the Patriots 11 of 12 were out of the specified PSI.
The exact pressure in the footballs has not been confirmed by the NFL. Balls inflated to minimum pressure at 70 degrees will certainly be below pressure at 50 degrees. And that’s IF (big IF!) gauges are actually accurate.
I believe the official marked them without ever testing them before the game. It actually seems to be the most logical solution.
Doesn’t the pump heat up as you inflate the balls to begin with? So you could be dumping warmer than room temperature air into the balls before sending them out in the cold.
Is it possible that the Colts’ balls were inflated at the maximum to begin with, while the Patriots’ were at the lower end of the legal amount? That would account for one team’s still being legal. Just throwing it out there.
Football ping
it also depends of the humidity of the air they were filled with, as someone mentioned, filled with nitrogen it has no humidity.
</sarcasm>
I knew it ....global warming
It would take only a couple seconds per ball, with a $2.99 bleeder, to drop the psi from 12 to 10. Take the balls into the private room, insert the bleeder, count one-Mississippi-two-Mississippi, then remove. You could deflate 12 footballs in less than one minute.
We worked this out for a deflation from 13 psig at an unknown temperature to 10 psig at 20 degrees F. Assuming volume is constant... I believe the answer was to inflate the balls at 97 degrees F.
Flubber Gas or have Moochelle Obama sit on one?