‘PSI: New England’ Would Actually Be a Good TV Show

Tom Brady image via AP

It’s a pun we’ve seen made way more than once since the Deflategate controversy began, but let’s just come out and say it: If they aired ‘PSI: New England’ on CBS Thursdays at 10 p.m., we’d watch. Think about it. This has all the elements of a good crime procedural centering on an NFL scandal of the week.

There’s an alleged misdeed: Officials found that the game balls used by the New England Patriots during Sunday’s AFC Championship game were in fact deflated below the regulation pressure of 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch (or PSIs).

There’s an investigation: Did the refs fail to properly inspect the balls at the start of the game or did the Patriots purposely deflate them after inspection to make them easier to throw and catch?

The investigation has science that’s sort of complicated in a high school chemistry kind of way that Americans with a 10th grade education will vaguely be able to follow: Pressure decreases with temperature so if you inflate a ball to a specific pressure at room temperature, then bring it outside on a cold day, the air will decrease in volume and exert less pressure. (That’s the combined gas law, for all you 8th grade science nerds out there.) Is this what happened to the Patriots’ game balls?

There are high stakes: the honor of a Super Bowl contender and its coach is on the line.

Sure, even given the year the NFL had, it seems a little unlikely that there would be 22 NFL scandals in a year worth investigation, as would be required for a full case-of-the-week style season of TV. But then again, NCIS has killed off more Navy servicemen in nine seasons than Operation Iraqi Freedom did in real life. Criminal Minds is a show where the central premise is that there is a serial killer on the loose in America literally once a week. We’ll just fudge it a bit.

Come on. Someone page CBS.