Bill Nye Offers His Findings on Properly Inflated Balls

By Genevieve Burgess | Miscellaneous | January 25, 2015 |

By Genevieve Burgess | Miscellaneous | January 25, 2015 |

Right now we’re all pretending we care about the inflation levels of footballs mostly because people don’t like the Patriots and want to pretend that this could somehow prevent them from going to the Super Bowl. Let’s just admit, up front, that the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl and a few under-inflated balls aren’t going to be stopping them. You can call them cheaters all you want, but a slightly squishier football is not ENTIRELY the reason they beat the Colts by 38 points.

Anyway, Bill Belichick attempted to explain away the incident by using a lot of science-y sounding words involving atmospheric pressure to explain how the balls totally deflated on their own. Interestingly, he says that the Patriots have always adhered to “the letter of the law” which is interesting since the letter vs. the spirit of the law is a fairly well-known idiom. Anyway, here’s ABC news reporting on Belichick’s attempts to justify their ball situation and Bill Nye shooting it down.

World News Videos | ABC World News

It looks like there was a longer segment involving Nye that was cut, which is tragic. I’d rather listen to Bill Nye talk about air pressure than people talk about this football “scandal” which, let me remind you, will make literally no difference in what happens at the Super Bowl. The Seahawks will play the Patriots, Katy Perry will perform at halftime, and we’ll all watch “for the commercials” which are never good enough to act as a real justification.