Did deflated football cause Chiefs’ first missed kick this year? Here’s Butker’s take
Shortly after he had his season-long perfect kicking streak snapped, Harrison Butker said the officials had an admission for him during halftime of Sunday’s Chiefs-Patriots game:
The kicking balls had been a bit deflated in the first half.
Butker’s comments Thursday confirmed some previous reporting from Mark Daniels of MassLive.com, who wrote that the kicking football Sunday weighed in at 11 pounds per square inch (PSI) in the first half. The NFL rulebook says footballs are supposed to be inflated to between 12 1/2 and 13 1/2 pounds.
So was that oversight the reason Butker’s 39-yard field goal attempt sailed wide right in the first quarter, ending a streak of 23 made field goals this season?
“I think it was technique,” Butker said of the issue. “It’s kind of one of those misfires that you wish you had back.”
Start with this: Butker says he prepares to kick footballs that aren’t perfect. In fact, during practice, he mixes fully inflated ones with some that don’t have as much air, simply to get a mixture of what he might experience in a game.
Some natural deflation is expected in cold weather, too. Butker, a seventh-year pro, even cited “ideal gas law” during a Thursday interview in front of his locker, saying he’s studied the physics of air pressure when the temperature drops.
“I’ve kicked a lot of big kicks with under-inflated balls, but that just is what happens with colder weather,” Butker said. “So it was nothing new to me, I guess. It was kind of routine.”
Butker said low-pressure balls could move more side-to-side if the kick rotates slowly. However, he’s found from experience that perfect foot-to-ball contact eliminates those problems, whether using aired-up footballs or not.
The bottom line: If a kicker does his job well, Butker believes he can execute a good kick on lower-PSI balls.
“Everybody’s got to deal with similar things, right?” Butker said. “Different air pressures, both teams are having to deal with it. Temperature, weather, rain, snow, all that, bad field, anything that happens ... it’s kind of an even playing field. And you’ve got to be able to adapt.”
The story has additional intrigue, given the setting. The Patriots previously were involved in the infamous “Deflategate,” where they were found to be responsible for intentionally lowering the PSI in footballs during games.
When asked about the under-inflated kicking balls from Sunday’s game, Chiefs coach Andy Reid said he was unaware that had happened before he was alerted to the story by a staff member Thursday.
“I’m not worried about all that,” Reid said.
Butker said the officials alerted him at halftime that they had reinflated the kicking balls for the start of the second half. In some previous cold-game instances, Butker said he’d requested that the refs add air pressure to kicking balls at halftime, saying “they do a great job” of that.
This miss, though, Butker put on himself. He said in pregame warmups, he’d attempted a 38-yard field goal that sliced to the right — the same direction it faded in the first quarter as well.
“Stuff like that happens, and you just roll with it,” Butker said of kicking low-pressure footballs. “I’ve made field goals, I made decent kickoffs with balls that maybe aren’t perfect 13 PSI indoor room temperature. But it’s just kind of the nature of the game.”
