Everyone from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Saturday Night Live is weighing in on the DeflateGate scandal, and now the official manufacturer of the league’s footballs -- Wilson Sporting Goods -- has joined the debate from Arizona, per a report from Boston.com.
Belichick’s DeflateGate story is ‘BS’ says football maker
The league’s manufacturer of footballs is claiming its innocence in the DeflateGate scandal.
Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports
The company claims that all of its footballs are set at the regulation air pressure when they are delivered to the NFL, and that there is little chance that a simple change in temperature could have significantly deflated the balls during the AFC Championship.
The company has a booth at this year's NFL Experience -- an interactive fanfest held in the days leading up to the Super Bowl at the Phoenix Convention Center -- where visitors can watch the creation of Wilson's league-regulated footballs from the initial bladder and lacing process, through the pressurization stage, and to the final weight check.
Wilson representative Jim Jenkins explained the process:
“[It] goes to 120 pounds for one minute, then back down to 13, and then when it comes out, see how nice everything looks? All the seams are perfect, laces are perfect. That’s what that does right there and it comes out 13 pounds per square inch.”
Jenkins confirmed that every single ball that leaves the factory is set at a pressure between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch, the official legal limit set by the NFL. When asked about Bill Belichick’s theory that the cold temperatures and wet conditions likely contributed to the ball being underinflated in the AFC title game, Jenkins laughed and replied, “That’s BS.”
Jenkins, who admitted that he is a Browns fan from Cleveland, thought that perhaps “maybe in a year or two” the ball’s PSI would fluctuate due to being placed in varying environments, but it’s not plausible for a transformation like that to occur in just a few hours during a game.
Wilson’s director of experiential marketing Molly Wallace reiterated Jenkins’ perspective, adding that a pressure change to the ball couldn’t occur “unless something happened to a bladder, but that really doesn’t happen and there’s no other real way.”
Now that almost everyone -- from Belichick to Tom Brady to the manufacturer of the league's footballs -- is claiming innocence in this scandal, it's looking more and more likely that we won't have any definitive answers to DeflateGate until the NFL completes its investigation.
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