On Dec. 4, the New York Giants got ahold of a couple of Pittsburgh Steeler footballs and decided to see if they were below the NFL pregame inflation minimum of 12.5 pounds per square inch.

“The PSIs were a little low,” Giants coach Ben McAdoo said.

According to the ProFootballTalk, the balls came in at 11.8 and 11.4 psi. The Giants told the league, although not via a “formal complaint,” whatever that is. The NFL isn’t saying much, but it apparently checked to see if the referees had maintained control of the balls and dismissed the situation quickly.

Why? Because by time the Giants obtained and presumably checked the balls on the sideline, the temperature in Pittsburgh was between 41.0 and 41.2 degrees, according to Weather Underground’s historical data.

Footballs lose air pressure in cold weather. The numbers were explained away by science, not cheating. This was nothing. Nothing happened, nothing at all.

“All footballs were in compliance,” the NFL stated after Fox’s Jay Glazer reported on the incident.

The situation was properly handled. Good job, NFL.

That means given the chance to do deflate-gate all over again – the initial situation with the New England Patriots scandal is nearly identical (even considering whatever happened in the Foxborough bathroom, which we’ll get to below) – the NFL chose to do nearly the exact opposite.

In action, if not words, the league is acknowledging it got it all wrong the first time. So now it’s incumbent upon NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to do the right thing and verbalize it with a simple but noble act.

He should apologize to Tom Brady.

*****

View photos Tom Brady ended up serving a four-game suspension for deflate-gate. (AP) More

The way the league handled the Giants-Steelers situation was a complete reversal from how it handled the Indianapolis-New England episode from the AFC championship game in January of 2015.

That night, an Indianapolis equipment intern thought a Patriots football felt underinflated. The Colts tested it on the sideline and sent word to team officials above. The Colts general manager immediately went to the NFL’s suite and shouted, “We’re playing with a small ball.”

The league scampered down to test at halftime. League vice president Troy Vincent, who was in charge of such things, later testified he’d never heard of Ideal Gas Law. As such, when the readings started coming in under 12.5, no one spoke up and said, “Those numbers are explainable.” Instead, they thought anything below 12.5 was cheating and something like 11.4 was significant cheating. Ignorance was bliss.

The league immediately began working backward, using damning and inaccurate leaks and the allowance of false reporting to stand for months to further its case. A multimillion-dollar “independent” investigation was launched.

It was a delicious scandal. The idea that Brady and the Patriots were cheating was good copy and fueled all sorts of fan and media angst.

It wasn’t true. Not then and not as a parade of scientists came out screaming that everyone should’ve paid more attention in science class back in high school. Most of the footballs were fine, easily explained away by the weather.

The other football PSIs were hard to discern. Since no one recorded the initial pregame levels, testing for how low was the acceptable low was impossible. Is 11.32 OK? (That’s what the NFL-hired science firm determined). Or is it 11.1? Or 10.8? Were the pregame footballs really at 12.5, or 12.3? No one knew. No one ever cared prior to this. There was confusion over the measuring gauges and time of measurement. This was a junk experiment. Even a game attendant taking footballs into a bathroom should have been deemed inconsequential, because if you can’t prove footballs were deflated in the first place, which the NFL never did, then what is there to investigate?

It should have ended there.

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