This may be a question better suited for xkcd what if? section...but here goes: with all the hoopla around the patriots / colts game and allegations of cheating by deflating footballs, I've read/heard only superficial reference to the notion that inflating the balls at a different temperature than the ambient field temperature could result in a swing in pressure, always by patriots apologists and never by anyone who seems to actually know the science. High school and college me is kicking current me for not being able to do a back of the envelope calculation on this, but I'm in the midst of a site launch with a project at work, so I turn to the stack exchange community:
Assume that the footballs were inflated at ~70 deg F and using the weather underground archive data with a mean of 34 deg F, min of 15 deg F, and max of 53 deg F. Is it at all feasible that the footballs were in fact not purposefully deflated, but instead lost pressure due to the temperature difference where they were inflated versus the field?