How the NFL Cheats: Ball Tampering

Whether you call it breaking the rules, bending the rules or just getting creative with the rules, cheating has always been a part of the NFL and always will be. This is Part 5 in a Bleacher Report series on how NFL players and teams seek out some advantage, any advantage, over their competition. Part 1 was on the use of foreign substances, Part 2 on gaining an extra edge at home, Part 3 on what goes on at the bottom of a pile and Part 4 on spying on opponents.

Deflategate might finally be in the past when Tom Brady returns from his four-game suspension this weekend. If we’re lucky, we may never hear another word about quarterbacks deflating, inflating or tampering with footballs in any other way.

But that won’t mean they’re not still doing it.

In so many ways, Brady is unlike any quarterback who has played the game. But in this one way, he is like virtually every quarterback who ever played the game: He likes his footballs a certain way.

For as long as footballs have had air valves, quarterbacks have been doing what they need to do to make those footballs feel right in their hands. 

Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has admitted to liking his footballs overinflated. How do they get that way? 

Jeff Blake, who played for the Jets, Bengals, Saints, Ravens, Cardinals, Eagles and Bears in a 13-year career, saw a lot of people doing the kinds of things to footballs that got Brady suspended.

Blake said in a 2015 interview with Nashville’s WGFX-FM (via ESPN.com’s Paul Kuharsky):

I’m just going to let the cat of the bag, every team does it, every game, it has been since I played. Cause when you take the balls out of the bag, they are rock hard. And you can’t feel the ball as well. It’s too hard. Everybody puts the pin in and lets just enough air out of the ball that you can feel it a little better. But it’s not the point to where it’s flat. So I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s not something that’s not been done for 20 years.

He is not the only quarterback to make such a statement. Don Majkowski, who played for the Packers, Colts and Lions in the 1980s and ’90s, told Bleacher Report a similar story.

“There was a little tampering with taking the pins they inflate balls with and letting a little air out,” he said. “There was some of that happening on the sidelines. It was just a little bit. The ball was probably still within legal weight. When it was zero degrees or minus-5 degrees and those balls were rock-hard, it helped to take a little bit of pressure out. In the cold, it was impossible to hold.”

Matt Leinart, who was with three teams over a seven-year career, took to Twitter to announce:

Every team tampers with the footballs. Ask any Qb In the league, this is ridiculous!!

— Matt Leinart (@MattLeinartQB) January 21, 2015

Former Falcons, Lions, Bears and Chargers quarterback Erik Kramer preferred his football to have a certain feel.

“I did state my preference on how I would like the ball to be to the equipment guy,” he said. “I preferred them a little softer; not a lot. Maybe a pound. At times they would feel very hard and slick.”

The surface of the football also is an issue to many QBs.

“Some guys like the beads more prominent; some guys …

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