Quote:
Originally Posted by vintagetoppsguy
Scott,
Right. Fortunately Yvette caught it and he must have thought it pretty important/suspicious enought to notify Mike Kensil (NFL vice president of operations) who personally went into the officials' locker room at halftime to inspect all the balls.
It's still kind of hard to believe that an official who was supposed to be selling the balls for charity was instead selling them on the side. You would think that each ball would be tracked and accounted for. It's also strange that they haven't named that official (they named the other officials involved).
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Here's the other thing - they are saying that suspicion was aroused because the substituted ball didn't have the correct markings by the official. The 'K' marking isn't done by the official, and I have never seen a 'K' ball that has any markings by the official - there are 16 for each game, and they are flown in and then the official holds onto them except for the time the teams have to rough them up, until game time. So no need to mark them.
In addition, while all game-used 'normal' balls DO have official markings on them, you rarely see those for sale - normally the NFL gives 'charities' (or whoever), the 'game prepared' balls that were not selected by the teams' quarterback;thus, no markings as they were never given to an official. By the way - the selling of 'game prepared' balls as 'game used' is not something that the NFL will acknowledge, but it's something I've seen over and over again. They play game-used collectors for fools.
My guess is that the NFL is giving reporters erroneous information, as a way to cover up that their processes aren't being followed.