Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: “What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense”


Let me start by saying, I don’t know anything about football. I’m from Los Angeles. We don’t have a football team. I went to NYU where the most popular sporting event is the Spring production of Damn Yankees. Up until very recently I thought football was soccer but with players who didn’t have feet, instead their legs ended with sort of rounded nubs—”balls,” if you will—and I thought it was so awful that millions of Americans get together every Sunday—which is the Lord’s day, by the way—to force disabled folk to compete in some sort of blood sport. It’s not that though. It turns out it’s the real life version of NFL Blitz, which it turns out isn’t just a video game. It’s based on a real thing. Anyway, what am I talking about?

Oh yeah! #Deflategate! The Patriots! (Why are they called “the Patriots”? I get that it’s about the American Revolution and Massachusetts played a key role in that but come on, we’re all patriots here, FOX News. Even the Bengals fans.) I don’t like the Patriots because they’re from Boston and Boston is the home of the worst NBA team in the whole wide world, the Celtics, who had the audacity to beat my Los Angeles Lakers a couple of times in the 1980s. Also, the Red Sox! They’re pretty awful! And Boston is a very cold city, at least in the winter. A not-so-long ago history of racism, Boston also has, let’s not forget. And New England clam chowder is garbage compared to Manhattan clam chowder. So, I say this just to be transparent. I don’t think I personally want the Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Maybe I do. The Seahawks don’t sound great. Pete Carroll is apparently a 9/11 truther, which is a turnoff.

Let’s veer this ramble towards the news: #Deflategate! Bill Belichick says he didn’t do it. It wasn’t him. It was Mr Blue in the Library with the piano wire. Or, something. He has a scientific explanation for why the balls were tested to be under-inflated.

“We simulated a game-day situation, in terms of the preparation of the footballs, and where the footballs were at various points in time during the day or night. … I would say that our preparation process for the footballs is what we do —I can’t speak for anybody else — and that process raises the PSI approximately one pound,” Belichick said. “That process of creating a tackiness, a texture — a right feel, whatever that feel is, whatever that feel is. It’s a sensation for the quarterback. What’s the right feel — that process elevates the PSI one pound, based on what our study showed. Which was multiple balls, multiple examples in the process, as we would do for a game.”

I don’t know what any of that really means. It reads like gibberish to me. I, like so many Republican politicians, am not a scientist. Bill Nye is though and he says it’s gibberish too:

“What he said didn’t make any sense…Rubbing the football, I don’t think, can change the pressure.”

And that’s the news. Goodnight and good luck.

P.S. One of the things I was confused about was how deflated balls would give an advantage to a football team, because presumably it would make them less aerodynamic, but as my colleague Tim McDonnell notes, it’s about “grippiness.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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