Its Superbowl Sunday !

Super Bowl 2015: Seahawks vs. Patriots Preview
By BENJAMIN HOFFMANJAN. 31, 2015

Patriots vs. Seahawks


6:30 p.m. Eastern, NBC

Line: Patriots by 1

New England did a remarkable job cobbling together a running game this season by mixing and matching players based on matchups. But when asked to face teams that had a lot of success defending the run, the Patriots tended to abandon that aspect of the game.

The playoffs proved to be a microcosm of the season. LeGarrette Blount helped lead the Patriots (12-4) to 177 yards on the ground and scored three touchdowns in the A.F.C. championship game two weeks ago against Indianapolis, but the week before, against the stout Baltimore defense, Patriots running backs combined for just seven carries and 14 yards. Rather than turn to Blount, Shane Vereen or Jonas Gray, New England was content to air it out, throwing the ball 51 times.

If quarterback Tom Brady wants to test Seattle (12-4) and its Legion of Boom secondary 51 times, this game could get out of hand quickly.

The defenders in Seattle’s secondary are a threat to make an interception on almost every pass play, but in between those game-changing turnovers they make receivers pay for catching the ball by delivering crushing hits. Rob Gronkowski and Brandon LaFell have the size to take some punishment (though it is questionable if anyone is built to take a hit from strong safety Kam Chancellor); Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola are both small players who will go against defenders who are far larger, far stronger and just as fast.

Cornerback Richard Sherman, the voice of the Seattle secondary, says Chancellor should not be underestimated, that his hard shots tend to stick in the heads of opponents.

“He goes out there and makes huge impact week in and week out,” Sherman said. “In the Super Bowl, he made an impact from the first play to the last play.”

On offense, Seattle passes just enough that the defense cannot focus solely on the run. A healthy Marshawn Lynch is almost impossible to contain anyway, and quarterback Russell Wilson carried the ball more times this season than any Patriots running back.

The reigning Super Bowl champions, the Seahawks turned to a grinding style this season after losing several reliable receivers, so viewers are unlikely to see a blowout similar to last year’s 43-8 Seattle victory over Denver. But the Seahawks should be able to put points on the board, which may not be true for Brady and the New England offense, unless the Patriots commit to running the ball and succeed.

In the A.F.C. championship game against Indianapolis, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady tossed the ball 16 yards to Nate Solder, left, an offensive tackle who for that play cross-dressed as a tight end. Afterward, Solder said the team had practiced the play for years before unveiling it.
Blount, like Lynch, is a big runner who is hard to bring down. Even if he is held to just a few yards a carry, giving him steady work throughout the game is New England’s best chance to win.

Strong safety Kam Chancellor is one of the leaders of Seattle’s punishing and opportunistic defense. Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press

“I don’t care about them being the top defense, that doesn’t bother me,” Blount said. “They were good enough to get here, just like we were good enough to get here. They’re not immortal. They can be beaten.”

Unless New England wants to change the way it has approached the game all season, Blount may never get a chance to prove himself right. Pick: Seahawks

BENJAMIN HOFFMAN

https://youtu.be/8iXdsvgpwc8

Half Time Commercial Superbowl XLVI 5th Feb 2012 when New York Giants beat New England Patriots 21-17

Chrysler's Commercial, narrated by Clint Eastwood, gives a hope filled message about the hardship in America. He ends the pep talk by saying "This country can't be knocked out in one punch. We get back up again, and when we do, the worlds is gonna hear the roar of are engines".

In many ways, it is half time in Sri-Lanka too !

A Guide to the Controversies of Super Bowl XLIX
By Joe DeLessio   Images

With two weeks between the NFL's conference championship games and the Super Bowl, it's not hard for even a minor controversy to dominate a news cycle. (Remember deer antler spray?) And so with the Seahawks and Patriots set to square off on Sunday, here's a guide to all of this year's assorted squabbles, both on and off the field.

Deflategate (or Ballghazi, or Whatever You Want to Call It)
Did Bill Belichick or Tom Brady have anything to do with the under-inflated footballs — making them easier to throw and catch in rainy weather — the Patriots used in the AFC championship game? Did anyone tamper with them at all after officials reviewed and approved the game balls? Could the weather and atmospheric conditions really have deflated the balls, explaining why they were found to have air pressure below league standards after the game? (Bill Nye says no, but at least one experiment says it's possible.) And what was that ballboy doing when he brought the balls into the bathroom for 90 seconds? Are the Patriots so good at avoiding fumbles that we should be suspicious? (Not really.) The biggest of this year's scandals led to a lot of questions, and even more jokes about male genitalia.

Marshawn Lynch Just Wants to Avoid a Fine
The Seahawks' running back had been threatened with a $500,000 fine if he skipped media day, the annual event in which players are asked important questions such as, "What is your favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?" and "What is your favorite movie starring Joe Pesci?" And so Lynch showed up as required and answered every question with some variation of the phrase "I'm here so I won't get fined." Then after a little less than five minutes, he left. (The NFL being the NFL, though, Lynch still might get fined for wearing a hat with the logo of his Beast Mode brand, since league rules prohibit the promotion of brands that conflict with league partners during certain events.)

Speaking of Lynch: The League Will Be Watching His Crotch
Lynch grabbed his crotch after scoring a touchdown in the NFC title game (and was fined $20,000 for it), but the league has made clear that if he does it in the Super Bowl, he'll be assessed a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct and Seattle will have to kick off from the 20-yard line. In a spinoff to this one, the league had been selling a $150 collage of photos that included one of Lynch making the gesture, but it has since been removed from the league's online store.

Did LaGarrette Blount Orchestrate His Return to New England?
Among the New England conspiracy theories this week: Whether the running back tried to get cut by the Steelers because he knew the Patriots, with whom he played in 2013, would sign him. On a scale of one-to-ten deflated footballs, this one gets maybe half a ball.

GoDaddy Pulls Its Puppy Ad
The web-hosting company planned on airing a spoof of a Budweiser ad about a lost dog who finds his way home with the help of the company's famous Clydesdales. In the GoDaddy ad, the puppy finds his way home — and is promptly shipped away because his owner sold him on a website she created. The ad was criticized by the Monterey County SPCA for making light of puppy mills, noting, "If you can buy a puppy online and have it shipped to you the next day, it’s likely you’re supporting inhumane breeding." GoDaddy pulled the ad in response to the backlash.

Richard Sherman vs. Robert Kraft
The star of one of last year's pre–Super Bowl story lines made headlines again, this year by talking about what the friendly relationship between New England owner Robert Kraft and commissioner Roger Goodell means for Deflategate:

"Will they be punished? Probably not," Sherman said. "Not as long Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell are still taking pictures at their respective homes. He (Goodell) was just at Kraft's house last week before the AFC Championship. Talk about conflict of interest. As long as that happens, it won't affect them at all."
Kraft responded by calling Sherman a "marketing whiz." He also noted that the party in question was for sponsors, who in turn grow league revenues, which ultimately benefits players because they get a large share of that money. Said Kraft: "I think Mr. Sherman understood that he's the biggest beneficiary, because they get over 50 percent of the revenues. So he didn't go to Harvard, but Stanford must be pretty good because he figured it out." Sherman then got into a debate with a reporter at media day who'd challenged him on his allegations. Said Sherman: "How many other owners does (Goodell) hang out with and take pictures with at their homes?  So did all these (owners) defend him in the Ray Rice deal, or was it Robert Kraft? Come on, who was the first person to call Roger Goodell (after the Rice scandal erupted)?"

Deflation Experiments Show Patriots May Have a Point After All
By JAMES GLANZJAN. 29, 2015


HOW IT ALL ADDS UP Thomas Healy, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, performed experiments to determine how atmospheric conditions might have affected the Patriots' footballs.

Thomas Healy does not have tickets to the Super Bowl, but he plans to fly to Phoenix with something that is even harder to come by than seats at Sunday’s game: the first detailed, experimental data on how atmospheric conditions might have reduced the air pressure in footballs used by the New England Patriots in their victory over the Indianapolis Colts nearly two weeks ago.

Those footballs, which the N.F.L. has said were deflated to pressures below league standards, have created a national meta-bowl whose outcome is seemingly as important as who wins on Sunday. The question driving the public dialogue is whether the Patriots tampered with the balls to make them easier to handle, or whether simply moving them from the warmth of a locker room to the chill and dampness of the field could account for the deflation.

The Patriots have absorbed a beating in that larger contest, with many scientists concluding that only the surreptitious hiss of air being released from the balls could explain the difference. But now the Patriots have started to rally, and in a big way. Healy, who provided The New York Times with an advance copy of his technical paper on the experiments, concluded that most or all of the deflation could be explained by those environmental effects.

“This analysis looks solid to me,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who reviewed the paper at The Times’s request. “To me, their measurements mean that there’s no evidence of foul play.”

Healy with some of the equations from his paper. Credit Michael Henninger for The New York Times
Other evidence is also turning the Patriots’ way. In a usually obscure profession that has received extraordinary attention during the controversy, some academic and research physicists now concede that they made a crucial error in their initial calculations, using an equation called the ideal gas law.

When that error is corrected, the amount of deflation predicted in moving from room temperature to a 50-degree field is roughly doubled. Healy, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, went further: He measured the pressure drop in 12 footballs when they were moved from a room at 75 degrees to one at 50 degrees (the approximate temperature on the field in the Colts game).

In the experiment, the deflation of the footballs was close to the larger, correctly calculated value. When Healy moistened the balls to mimic the effects of the rainy weather that day, the pressure dropped even further, close to the deflation of 2 pounds per square inch that the N.F.L. is believed to have found.

Still, several loose ends ensure that the controversy is not close to finished. If the Colts’ footballs were properly inflated, as they reportedly were, it might indicate that they were handled differently or inflated more fully to start with. If it turns out that both sets of balls were inflated and handled similarly, the N.F.L. is back to the likelihood that there was tampering by the Patriots.

IDEAL GAS LAW Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. professor of physics, wrote out the equation, below, which was used in initial calculations in the New England case. Credit Julia Robinson for The New York Times
As the Super Bowl approaches, physicists and engineers at some of the nation’s most prestigious research institutions have been put into an unaccustomed spotlight as they try to resolve the issue. The Times reported on Tuesday that N.F.L. investigators had contacted the Columbia physics department for help with “matters relating to gas physics and environmental impacts on inflated footballs.”

Alan Nathan, a nuclear physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is known for his work in the physics of baseball, said that field had not garnered such interest since Sammy Sosa, a Chicago Cubs outfielder, was caught with a corked bat in 2003. Nathan eventually concluded that corking a bat did not make much difference, especially for Sosa’s specialty, which was hitting home runs.

“It’s probably much ado about nothing,” Nathan said of the football controversy. “I would be pretty surprised if the N.F.L. takes any serious action on this.”

Some physicists welcomed the attention to a field usually obsessed with particles that most people would find unpronounceable and equations that were less understandable than colloquial Mandarin.

“The fact that the word ‘physics’ appears in the sports pages is something that I wouldn’t have expected,” said Rocky Kolb, dean of physical sciences at the University of Chicago, “so that makes me happy.”

When the football controversy arose, a number of physicists cited the ideal gas law, which many of them taught in introductory courses. But applying the equation to real situations can be surprisingly deceptive. When a gauge indicates that the ball contains 12.5 p.s.i. — the minimum allowed by the N.F.L. — the actual pressure is more than twice that amount because the surrounding pressure of the atmosphere must be considered.

Tegmark used a photographer's white board to explain the Ideal Gas Law. Credit Julia Robinson for The New York Times
This roughly doubles how much a dip in temperature can lower the pressure. During a phone conversation, even Tegmark, the M.I.T. professor, initially used the lower value until recognizing the mistake. “I stand corrected,” he said, adding, “It’s pretty funny that the ideal gas law is making headlines.”

Timothy Gay, an experimental physicist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who once wrote a book called “The Physics of Football,” with a foreword by Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ coach, said there was no doubt that a slightly deflated ball would be easier to grip. But he said his own calculations and Healy’s paper, a few details of which had previously leaked out, persuaded him that the weather could account for the pressure drop.

DEFLATION Timothy Gay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has a book called “The Physics of Football.”
Belichick and Tom Brady have denied tampering with a football, but Belichick may have undermined his case with a confusing appeal to scientific principles in a news conference Saturday. “Belichick’s press conference raised exactly the correct issues, inarticulate as it was,” Gay said.

Healy, 22, is an entrepreneur as well as a graduate student. He founded an independent lab, HeadSmart, which he said was created to study ways in which football helmets could better prevent concussions. He was also a punter on Carnegie Mellon’s football team until leg injuries forced him to stop playing.

When the football controversy began, Healy said, the lab had most of the necessary equipment for the new experiments. The team has also started looking at other effects that could be important, including commercial pumps that often spit out air as hot as 130 degrees. When the air cools, that could affect the deflation as well, he said.

Healy, who is from the Boston area, conceded that he would be rooting for the Patriots — whether he gets tickets or not — but said engineers who were not Patriots fans had helped with the experiments. He said his interest was just in the science.

“It’s bringing science to a really public light, especially when everybody is getting interested in the Super Bowl,” Healy said.

Aney chemist, very good neda superbowl. super super.
my superbowl tomoro like. why after super tax and kottas comming down, i will have to go with begging bowl.

i wish we can send ranil and ravi to play american football. ravi as Quaterback like. must get sacked (it is football term no ?) that fellow tissa attanayake will make a good Running Back no ?

whatever said and done apey hirunika will make good cheerleader.