Footballs



       To someone who has never played football the ball may not seem very important but in the NFL they take the matter very seriously. The league has rigid rules put in place to make sure that the footballs are the for everyone every time teams play.

Rules

        In the rules for the balls of a football game the NFL covers all their bases. They state everything from the brand of football to the lengths of the circumferences, weight of the ball and even the specific shape, prolate spheroid. Before each game the referees have to check each teams footballs, the offenses of each team use their own footballs to have the quarterbacks be comfortable with the footballs, and see that they abide by all the rules. Doing this keeps the game on more of a level plane for both sides. The same goes for having special footballs just for the kicking teams to use.

Kickoff(4)


Click here(16) to see for yourself how strict they are about the football in the NFL.

Controversies

    Over the many years that there has been a professional football league there has almost always been a controversy about the football. Most of them aren't that much fuss while there are some that pick up a lot of media. An older controversy about the ball was that people thought Ray Guy, the punter of the Oakland Raiders from '73 to '86, had helium put into the footballs because he was getting so much hang time on the ball when he punted. The reason people thought that helium would give him more hang time is because helium has less grams per mole than air which would make it lighter and be able to fly further supposedly.

Ray Guy punter(5)

    Another major controversy about the football that happened more recently was "deflate gate". During the 2014 AFC Championship game between the Colts and the Patriots it is supposed that the Patriots supplied and were playing with footballs that were under inflated. A couple of reasons that an under inflated football would be beneficial for a team would be that with less air in the ball it would be easier for receivers to catch because the ball would be less elastic when they come in contact so it wouldn't bounce as much as normal making it easier to catch. With less air the ball would also be easier for players to hold onto because they would be able to press it into their bodies much more. That gives it more surface area and allows it to have a higher coefficient of friction like how a car tire can have better traction when it is inflated so that the tire can sort of mold more to the ground/rocks instead of just bounce over them. The patriots claim that the loss of pressure in the balls was from the temperature change that they underwent from when they were in the locker room areas to the field. As believable as this would be because as we all know PV=nRT, and if we assume that the volume is held constant while n & R are also held constant then if the temperature were to go down the pressure would have to go down. For the pressure to have dropped as much as it did in the Patriot's footballs the locker room would have had to of been as warm as a sauna(6).


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