OT: World has gone insane. Every ESPN commentator agrees Patriots legacy tainted.

It's irrelevent whether it changed the game or not.  It could even be proven to have somehow helped the Colts and it wouldn't matter.  I'm befuddled as to why or how you could even think that was in any way even tangentially relevent. 

He cheated.  On purpose.  That's what's relevent.

Andi it is quite reasonable to say this casts a pall on his entire career and the Patriots entire run because it raises serious questions about what we don't know.  The spygate incident was serious enough that the Patriots lost a first round pick.  That's serious.  That's a big deal.  And many presumably impartial people who make their living in and around professional football believe that the punishment would have been worse than that if Kraft wasn't good friends with the commissioner.

Now you have another cheating incident, which shows planning and forethought and a willingness to blatantly deceive officials and cheat in order to gain what was presumably not even that huge of an advantage. 

So it's entirely reasonable-- in fact, I would say logical and normal-- to wonder how many other times the Patriots organization has willfully cheated and just not been caught.  It could be zero, or it could be more than zero.  But that suspicion will always cloud how they are perceived, and it *should* cloud how they are perceived.  There's a price for the actions we take, and when you choose to cheat or lie and get caught, not once but twice, that price is that reasonable people will have doubts about your integrity even in instances in which there is no specific evidence of wrongdoing.

There is exactly one plausible reason for why the balls were correctly inflated when inspected by the officials, videotaped beingt taken from the room by the equipment manager for a period of time, then all underflated by the same amount, by an amount that was noticable enough that an opposing player who intercepted the ball immediately brought it to the officals attention: they were intentionally underinflated.

There isn't any other plausible explanation.

And I have no idea what physics has to do with it.  I certainly hope you're not referring to the absurd theory that floated around for about 10 mintues that somehow the temperature had somethingt to do with it, because that was debunked immediately, both because we have hundreds or even thousands of games which have been played in cold whether in which this didn't happen, but even more importantly becuase it didn't happen to any of the balls the Colts were using.

But by all means, please enlighten me by listing some of the other plausible explanations; I will gracefully issue an apology if you can provide a single one.