Presumably they will get the Super Bowl out of the way today — XLIX, I guess it is — and the NFL can turn its full attention to figuring out why the New England Patriots’ footballs were underinflated for the AFC championship game.

The nation demands it.

On the surface, it would not seem like that tough of a nut to crack.

The balls were underinflated. A common, everyday pressure gauge was able to figure that out.

We have heard from some of the world’s leading scientists that, once properly inflated, they don’t normally, and suddenly, get underinflated by accident.

The nagging questions, of course, are: Who did it? Why did he do it? Who told him to do it? And when did anybody of authority know it was done?

Once the Super Bowl is in the books and no subsequent penalty of punishment can any effect on The Big Show, I think you will be shocked at how quickly this mystery’s pieces start suddenly fitting into place.

There may even be mass confessions.

Then NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell can assign blame and hand out his sentences.

He is in a bit of a pickle here, even if to the common fan it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Many of them probably weren’t even aware that there were strict pounds per square inch regulations for NFL games.

But there are, and if (when?) the Patriots are found to have tampered with that rule, the punishment should be stiff, although only a true skeptic would suggest too stiff to be dealt with before the Super Bowl.

But Goodell has already established himself as a no-nonsense supreme ruler of all things NFL.

The New Orleans Saints, for random example, will be paying particular attention to what comes down from a commissioner who, to them, was a hanging judge.

Or did you forget Bountygate? Huge fines, suspensions left and right — most damaging, the banishment for a year of Saints’ head coach Sean Payton.

Goodell can’t have it both ways.

The Case of the Deflated Game Balls is probably something he’d just as soon would just go away quietly.

Unfortunately it was center stage for two weeks of the mass media overkill surrounding the league’s showcase event. It was challenged only by Marshawn Lynch’s riveting (stone-faced) news conferences, which Goodell will also have to decide if meets the minimum criteria for “speaking with the media.”

Will he be as tough, relatively speaking, on the Patriots as he was in bombing the Saints into the Stone Age?

True, you have to keep in mind that the Saints were punished as much for their arrogance as their sins — in ignoring the league’s warnings that the gumshoes were on to their shenanigans.

They might well have gotten off with a warning or slap on the wrist if they’d heeded the early cease-and-desist order.

Still, although there was ample evidence that some kind of show-off cash was being anted up in their macho gamesmanship, you couldn’t point to any play in any game and say, “Oh, yeah, he was trying to sweep the pot with that dirty hit there.”

The games kind of played out in their normal, rough-and-tumble style.

In other words, stupid and childish as it might have been, there was no smoking gun that Bountygate had any effect on the outcome of any Saints’ game.

It did nothing to upset the delicate competitive balance.

It was really more of a public relations nightmare for the league, which due to pending lawsuits is ever mindful of doing everything it can to promote as safe a game as possible with 260-pounders slamming into each other at warp speed.

So Goodell hammered the Saints as a shining example, Exhibit A perhaps, of how much the league really cared about its foot soldiers.

This is different.

This, if true, was cheating by the Patriots, plain and simple.

If you buy into the notion that deflated balls are easier to throw and catch, then the Patriots gained an unfair advantage that day against the Colts, and it doesn’t really matter that it would appear to be overkill in a 45-7 shellacking.

Maybe the common fan can’t grasp the notion.

In a lot of ways it sounds silly at worst, insignificant at best.

But experts such as Hall-of-Famers Joe Montana, Troy Aikman and others have checked in and said, sure, the psi of the footballs matters. And they can tell the difference.

You can’t ignore it.

If it’s a rule, it’s a rule.

So the question becomes whether Goodell cares as much about the integrity of the playing field as he does about sending a statement to boost the league’s image?

The severe sanctions levied on the Saints set the precedent for one.

They and their fans likely will be very interested to eventually learn if that precedent holds when the competition on the field is jeopardized.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com

(MGNonline)