An "experiment" done by "unbiased" Massachusetts high skool students who achieved the results they set out to get.
Thermodynamically, dunking a ball in a bucket of cold water is far more severe than what would happen to a ball in air at that temperature, or even getting some rain on it.
And this "experiment" gives no explanation of why the Patriots' balls deflated and the Colts' balls didn't, under the same conditions.
It’s about what you’d expect from the equations.
...although I believe there was a mistake. I think the starting pressure was 13.3 PSI, not 13.5.
“Thermodynamically severe”? That might apply if the rate of cooling were at issue.
Why didn’t the Colts balls cool as expected if the conditions wee identical? The most obvious reasons are they might not have been subject to identical conditions or testing. They certainly should have cooled at least from the max stated in the guidelines to below the minimum if they were under the conditions people generally think they were, and measured at the times people think they were.
The simplest explanation is that the assumptions there are flawed...as opposed to assuming that the Patriots cheated by NOT having magic balls that the Colts must have had.