The New Yorker publishes DeflateGate cartoon (Photo)

The magazine published its daily cartoon satirizing the controversy involving ball deflation and the New England Patriots.

Avid readers of The New Yorker magazine were given a reason to chortle over their English breakfast this morning. A cartoon lampooning the ongoing controversy of ball inflation at the AFC Championship game was published for the magazine.

The cartoon by Joe Dator depicts a trio of generic football players inspecting a deflated football while their heads are deflated themselves, no doubt from repeated exposure to coach speak and post-game press conferences.

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The New Yorker has featured cartoons in its issues since its first publication in 1925, generally featuring one panel and an optional caption. While the New Yorker typically stays within the realms of politics, culture and current events, it will stray into sports often for its cartoons as well as articles. Truly, who could forget Posh Cheesehead?

The cartoon from today demonstrates the ubiquity of the #DeflateGate controversy (the hashtag is absolutely necessary). Part of this is opportunism from comedians trying joke about balls, but the conversation has reached outside the bubble of sports news and into mass media.

However, this appears to be an issue that’s enormous everywhere except the league itself, where this practice was already somewhat in place. Phil Simms talked about how Aaron Rodgers likes his footballs over-inflated on live television.

The cartoon also incorporates issues with player safety. The players in the cartoon didn’t get mashed potato heads from thinking about the PSI inside the football. Juxtaposing these two ideas demonstrates the priority of stories within NFL coverage; it is much less fun to discuss the increasingly disturbing information coming out on player safety.

But hey, who could pass up an opportunity to joke about balls.

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