American Football - What should be the penalty for the Patriots underinflated balls vs the Colts?

[Arkaign]

This is bad all the way around. I think it's mostly a non issue, mainly because I think there should be more leeway with the air pressure anyway. Set it to whatever you want at 10lbs+ imo for your team.

The NFL should change the custody of the balls to ref only to shut down conspiracy talk in the future now that this has blown up, and have the teams request their pressure level ahead of time between 10lbs-14lbs.

As for the 'punishment', you can bet the NFL is not thinking about what's fair, they're thinking of what's best for the NFL. So with all the severe embarrassments they've brought on themselves this year, they might overdo the punishment. At the same time, they are probably going to downplay it as long as possible to get past the SB, because billions are on the line, and the extra hype from this overinflated controversy may be seen even as a bonus by some in the league office. I mean they got an opening skit on SNL, that alone will probably get a few extra % points of folks to tune in that might have otherwise skipped it. The old adage 'no such thing as bad PR' is grossly oversimplified, but for the most part it holds true.

Overall though, bar PR is still bad PR, so watch them try to kill it right after the SB if I were a betting man on that kind of thing. They'll let it simmer until the postseason really begins, and then they'll try to look less shady than they already look.

Goodell and Blandino need to GTFO. They are at risk of permanently damaging the sport with their continued mismanagement of the entire shebang. The whole way the rules, fines, penalties, etc are set up is laughably bad. Wear the wrong headphones or shoes? Don't talk to the media the way they want? Big fine. Perpetrate an illegal hit that could paralyze someone well after the play is over? Usually no fine, sometimes a flag, and too often absolutely nothing at all, when in fact ejections, suspensions, and huge fines should lean towards things that show the terrible combination of intentionally trying to hurt a player AND in a way that's well outside of the official rules (eg; super late hits, hits after a play is dead, hits way out of bounds, etc). And fine refs for doing a shit job while we're at it.