The first time there was a question about the inflation levels of footballs in Patriots games, the ensuing investigation ended with suspensions and acrimony.
Last Sunday’s game against the Chiefs featured another issue with the amount of air in balls, but things aren’t going to get quite so messy this time around. A report this week said that the kicking footballs used by both teams were underinflated in the first half of the game and that they were brought to the proper level at halftime.
Patriots head coach Bill Belichick confirmed at his Friday press conference that the Patriots became aware of the issue in the first quarter while noting that neither team handles the kicking balls ahead of the game.
“Well, the officials handle that, and they were underinflated by 2-2.5 pounds,” Belichick said. “I think you could see that by the kicks. Both kickers missed kicks. [Chiefs kicker Harrison] Butker hadn’t missed a kick all year. Kickoffs, we had two of them that almost went out of bounds. So, they had six balls. It was both sets of balls. It was all six of them. So, I don’t know. You have to talk to the league about what happened on that because we don’t have anything to do with that part of it. They control all that. They fixed them at halftime, but didn’t do it before then, which is another question you could ask. But, we don’t have anything to do with it. Were we aware of it? Definitely. But, as I understand it, they were all the same.”
Belichick said he doesn’t know “what the explanation is” for what went wrong since it was out of the team’s control, but it seems there will be a lot less time spent figuring out what happened than there was in 2015.
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