Yup yup. IIRC, Carnegie Mellon came in hor and heavy, and then MIT a day or two later, and once those heavy weights were in the ring, the balance tipped… among the scientifically inclined anyway. And even people like SI ran it.
Which is why I see it as so impossibly fucked up. Putting aside how many high school and college students should have known it, the sheer number of academics—grad students and professors—
actively working on current projects at the time must have been substantial; this wasn’t some kind of esoteric secret.
Hell, the NFL and ownership is pretty connected—maybe call NASA and see if anyone working in any of the space craft programs has had occasion to think about the relationship between changing temperature and pressure and such?
I haven’t seen this mentioned, but IIRC, when the NFL announced they would be doing pressure checks on balls the next season they also said they would not be releasing results. How would it even be possible that they didn’t know the answer by then such that they would need to do the checks? That people let the idea of checks without reported results slide…?
I don’t expect everyone in the country to be proficient in science. But this was a big story—arguably too big, given the disproportionate weight we put on sports (Says the guy who ran herd on the DG Legal Thread…
)—and it should be clear that, given the settled nature of the actual science, we had lots and lots and lots of people that would know how this actually worked…
…and yet, look at the state of “opinion” today.
But even more so: The NFL knew they could pull this off, and they did.