HeadSmart Labs backs up Bill Belichick (Video)

While science guy Bill Nye thinks New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick was full of hot air in his explanation of the deflated football mystery, other science dudes back up The Hoodie.

So was Bill Belichick full of hot air on Saturday?

The New England Patriots coach said Saturday at an unscheduled news conference that his team did nothing illegal to cause footballs from the Jan. 18 AFC Championship against the Indianapolis Colts to lose air pressure.

Belichick went on a rambling five-minute missive with reporters to insist his team did nothing wrong.

But Bill Nye, television’s famed “Science Guy,” said the only way air could come out of footballs is by manually inserting a needle with a pressure gauge into a ball and letting air out by hand.

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At issue is 11 of 12 game balls used by New England in the first half of that game that have reportedly been found to contain two pounds of air pressure less than the NFL’s prescribed lower limit of 12½ pounds per square inch.

Per The Washington Post, Nye told Good Morning America on Sunday that manual deflation of the footballs is the only explanation that floats.

However, Pittsburgh-based HeadSmart Labs did a study last week that found that the weather conditions could have accounted for the change.

According to HeadSmart, testing footballs to ensure they are at 12½ PSI in a 75-degree room—akin to a locker room at a stadium—and then taking those footballs into 50-degree, rainy weather could have the effect of lowering the air pressure by up to 1.9 pounds per square inch.

Here is what HeadSmart found:

Since this is now a sixth-day story—a fact that makes me want to deflate my own skull—the odds are slim that the controversy will die down when all of the media in the free world descends upon Glendale, Ariz., this week, where the Patriots take on the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX on Feb. 1.

But it’s also worth pointing out that Nye—who offered little in the way of specifics while attacking Belichick’s scientific-sounding explanation—also closed his visit to GMA with “Go Seahawks.”

Unbiased? Not so much.

I read on my Twitter timeline earlier this week that if the 2007 videotaping scandal involving the Patriots was a felony, letting the air out of footballs would be a misdemeanor.

I’m more of the opinion that deflating footballs is like a jaywalking violation, at best, but that’s just me.

I base this on the fact that while helping out with a high-school football team this year, I was privy to conversations between the coaching staff and the starting quarterback about what football he wanted to use and how he wanted it to feel.

I figure if this is going on at the prep level, a guy like Tom Brady is probably going to have a lot to say about how the NFL’s game footballs feel in his hands.

I am further of the opinion that if the team name was something like, say, “Jacksonville Jaguars,” instead of the New England Patriots, the number of people pretending to give a rat’s a** about this issue would be reduced by about 99.9985 percent.

But maybe that’s just me being a cynic again.

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