--- title: The Real ‘Deflategate’ Scandal Is That Anyone Cares description: The NFL would rather you care about the minor thing they can pretend to fix, rather than the major things they can't. canonical: https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/ author: Chris Kluwe article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-01-22T21:25:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T09:02:37.237Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Real ‘Deflategate’ Scandal Is That Anyone Cares og:description: The NFL would rather you care about the minor thing they can pretend to fix, rather than the major things they can't. og:url: https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4c9d2dcacf7251f6/69877b65cd6848626c09946e/nfl-balls.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3504 og:image:height: 1971 og:image:alt: Oakland Raiders v Denver Broncos og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Real ‘Deflategate’ Scandal Is That Anyone Cares twitter:description: The NFL would rather you care about the minor thing they can pretend to fix, rather than the major things they can't. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4c9d2dcacf7251f6/69877b65cd6848626c09946e/nfl-balls.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Real 'Deflategate' Scandal Is That Anyone Cares > Sponsored content. 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[Watch (HLS stream): Will Deflategate Tarnish The Patriots?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/CHTINYpK.m3u8) (2:42)  _Published 2015-01-23_ by [Chris Kluwe](https://time.com/author/chris-kluwe/) ## Chris Kluwe Jan 22, 2015 9:25 PM UTC by [Chris Kluwe](https://time.com/author/chris-kluwe/) ## Chris Kluwe Jan 22, 2015 9:25 PM UTC In a league built off human beings’ suffering permanent debilitating brain damage and whose participants are eight times as likely to develop ALS; one that takes public money from schools and infrastructure to build lavish stadiums that are inevitably abandoned; an organization that does its very best to sweep domestic violence and DUIs and criminal complaints under the rug until the problems become too big to ignore — in this madhouse, the main talking point leading up to Super Bowl XLIX is whether or not the Patriots’ balls were inflated properly. Seriously. Grown men (presumably) are earnestly debating what punishments should be levied on a team that tried to eke out a minuscule advantage over an opponent they soundly thrashed, all the while ignoring the massive structural problems inherent in this system. It’s like ignoring Endor to focus on one tree. And for what? To enforce some arbitrary rule in an already arbitrary game? News flash: Football is not the pure homage to sport you want it to be. Football is poor, nasty and brutish, filled with obsessive individuals willing to take any risk and game any system if it brings them an inch closer to victory. Football is filled with human beings injecting their bodies with chemical cocktails (some legal, some not) that turn internal organs into pink slurry, because to not be on the field means losing their job. And you’re worried about ball pressure? Give me a break. All the things that people watch football for — the gladiatorial spectacle of bodies pushed to and past their limits, the tense thrill of simulated combat, the raw emotion after a close fought game or an improbable comeback — all of those come with a price, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. It’s a price that frequently leaves its participants battered and broken, and the scandal here is a PSI? Baaaaaarf. Why does it matter if a quarterback likes his balls to be a bit underinflated or overinflated? It’s an arbitrary standard set by a rules committee decades ago. There aren’t any pregame shows dedicated to what the equipment guys have to do to get the balls ready for play. There’s no _Sports Science_ on the difference between the tactile surface of a fresh-out-of-the-bag ball vs. one that’s been worn in. There’s no _Behind the Lines_ on what it means to try and kick a QB ball or trying to throw a K ball. The football is a means to an end, and that end is entertainment. Every player’s sole purpose out there is to entertain you, and the better we can do that, the more likely you are to keep watching. When I played, we did whatever we could to the footballs to try to make them easier to kick — pound them against a bench, press them down on the tee, anything to make our tools the slightest bit better. It was our job to be entertainment, and people are much more entertained by completed passes and booming punts and made field goals. No one cares about a game with crappy plays. Know what else no one cares about? The other tools on the field — the players. You don’t care about the concussion a running back suffers when a defensive linemen jams a knee into the back of his head, or the slipped disc when a linebacker blindsides a receiver. You’re not thinking about a player’s health 20 years from now, when he has to walk with a cane — assuming he can still walk. When he’s gone, you’ll cheer for the next guy just as hard, because the uniform’s still the same. Do you even know what the protocol is for players to receive a payment under the NFL’s concussion “settlement”? No? Why do you suddenly care so much about a rubber bladder wrapped in leather? I’ll tell you why you care about Deflategate/Ballghazi, why the sports media is furiously spitting out hot take after hot take in a splattering froth. See, the NFL would rather you care about the minor thing it can pretend to fix, rather than the major thing it can’t — that its product is built on breaking people, some of whom never get put back together again. The NFL would much rather you invest your time and energy into calculating the atmospheric pressure as it relates to temperature differentials, and how many draft picks this could possibly cost, and what an appropriate fine would be, instead of thinking about retired players committing suicide due to brain damage, or medical scandals where physicians put a corporation’s interests before their patients’, or just how much money the owners make each year. The NFL wants you to keep buying what it sells, and the easiest way to do that is to have a “controversy” that’s not really controversial at all. Instead of asking how many needles went into game balls, ask how many Toradol shots went into bodies before the game, and what price an extra two games a year would add. Instead of wondering what penalties the commissioner might impose, wonder why a man more concerned with PR than with actually doing the right thing has such broad and unchecked power. Instead of rehashing the talking points a “sports news” network incestuously intertwined with the sport it covers gives you, ask yourself why you care so much about something so incredibly minor. The NFL has plenty of scandals. This is not one of them. _Kluwe is a retired NFL player who played for eight seasons with the Minnesota Vikings._ ## Transcript The New England Patriots are days away form the Superbowl, and yet no one really seems to care. That's cause all anyone actually wants to talk about is deflate game. I sat down with Times senior writer Sean Gregory to better understand all the controversy. But first, here's what you need to know about the story. The NFL found that 11 of the Patriot's footballs from the. Championship game were under- inflated by two pounds a piece. I had no knowledge whatsoever of this situation until Monday morning. I have never talked to any player, staff member about. Football air pressure. You know, I didn't alter the ball in any way. You know, I believe in fair play. And I will always believe in it for as long as I'm playing. So let's start at the beginning. How come no one believes the Patriots? Because we had SpyGate in 2007. The Patriots were famously. but fined $ 250, 000, they got a draft pick taken away from them. Bill Belichick was fined a half a million dollars for videotaping defensive opponents signals the New York Jets. So, they have a history and even in the playoffs there was, there was this talk about whether their formations were legal or not. They were, but they were tricky and deceptive so. You know, Bill Belichick has this reputation of being an evil, conniving genius kind of for good reason. Will we ever know what really happened? It's gonna be really hard to prove minus some kind of forensic evidence on a football, which is hard to, you know, just kind of intuitively you deflate it with a needle and you inflate it with a needle. So, it's the same mechanism on the ball. Right. So how are you gonna prove this minus a ball boy coming forward or somebody going, you know, somebody being a whistleblower or somebody getting paid off and becoming a whistleblower, who know? Why deflate balls at all? I just think it's basic math. You know, your hands are the same size no matter. If the ball's a little smaller, the shape of the football, you can grip it better and throw it further. Will that simply deflect all of the attention and the game will completely take our minds off of Deflate- Gate? Or will this cast a much more serious black mark on the Patriots going forward? It's not, I don't see it fading away. You kind of think, all right. One, she gets it. People are getting to Arizona, there's all this circus stuff, but. Me, the media axis now is gonna be about asking every Patriot player about deflategate. And that, so, I, I. Because it looks like the Patriots cheated. You could say, well, it isn't a serious cheat. You know, they won 54- 7, it would not have made a difference. But. How long has this been going on? Mm- hm. I mean that's the thing that [ UNKNOWN ] kind of brought up too. You know, alright one team caught them but how long has this been going on? ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/"},"headline":"The Real 'Deflategate' Scandal Is That Anyone Cares","datePublished":"2015-01-22T21:25:36.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-01T09:02:37.237Z","description":"The NFL would rather you care about the minor thing they can pretend to fix, rather than the major things they can't.","url":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/","keywords":["Sports topic"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4c9d2dcacf7251f6/69877b65cd6848626c09946e/nfl-balls.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Chris Kluwe","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/chris-kluwe/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4c9d2dcacf7251f6/69877b65cd6848626c09946e/nfl-balls.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Oakland Raiders v Denver Broncos","caption":"Oakland Raiders v Denver Broncos","creditText":"Doug Pensinger—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/","name":"The Real 'Deflategate' Scandal Is That Anyone Cares"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Will Deflategate Tarnish The Patriots?","description":"","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/CHTINYpK/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2015-01-23T23:33:17.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/CHTINYpK.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/","duration":"PT2M42S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3679079/patriots-under-inflated-balls-deflategate-nfl-scandal/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```