BOSTON — In case you missed it this week — and really, how could you?! — the Patriots and Chiefs played on Sunday with underinflated kicking balls in the first half. That was a half that featured a rare field-goal miss from Kansas City’s Harrison Butker and another (more common) missed field-goal attempt from New England’s Chad Ryland.
According to Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, the issue is fairly obvious to the players and coaches on the field.
“Yeah, we were aware of it in the first quarter,” Belichick said Friday. “How it happened? Well, the officials handled that, and they were underinflated by two, two and a half pounds. I think you could see that by the kicks. Both kickers missed kicks — and Butker hadn’t missed a kick all year. Kickoffs — you know, we had two, and one of them almost went out of bounds. And so they took six balls — it was both sets of balls, it was all six of them. So I don’t know, you’d have to talk to the league on what happened on that, because we don’t have anything to do with that part of it.”
While Belichick doesn’t have any idea how or why the footballs were not inflated properly, he seemed to have one leftover question about why the officials didn’t fix the problem immediately.
“They control all that, then they fixed them at halftime, but didn’t do it before then. Which is another question you could ask,” Belichick said. “But we don’t have anything to do with it. Were we aware of it? Yeah, definitely. But they were all, as I understand it, they were all the same.”
(Mark Daniels, who broke the story earlier this week, did ask the league. The NFL declined comment. Cloak. Dagger.)
It’s a fair question by Belichick. While the NFL would perhaps not want to be seen manipulating air pressure inside footballs while in plain view of the public, the league did spend a couple of years trying to make the case that literally nothing else in the world is more critical to the integrity of the game than the PSI of footballs. The league has of course been proven hypocritical in this area several times before, so allowing a game to be played with footballs below the allowable PSI limit is not entirely surprising.
Yet if both teams could tell that the kicking balls weren’t right, it’s certainly worth asking how that happened and why the NFL waited until halftime to fix the problem.
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