You made it an issue by your statement: "Pressure drops from 13.5 to 11.9 in minutes".
The connection between temperature and pressure is well understood.
If the experiment was, as I suspect, an effort to demonstrate that the environmental conditions at game time were sufficient to explain the NFL's observation that the Patriots' balls were underinflated, the experiment was essentially meaningless.
We know the weather conditions, so we know the end point temperature, but we really don't know the initial temperature of the balls when their pressures were tested prior to the game.
Hopefully, the NFL has that information.
I’m lepton. That post was TO me, not from me. As a matter of fact, I corrected the numbers.
Yeah...we don’t know the initial temperature...or a whole bunch of other things, the total of which are of similar size as the reported results. Even how recently the balls had been inflated could play into it, as the air could have been even warmer than room temperature to begin with.
What the test demonstrates is that a temperature change of approximately 24 degrees can reduce the pressure by about 1.4 PSI. There are other factors that might change it a bit more.
Maybe the NFL will release enough detail to determine whether that accounts for it all, or not.