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As the NFL closes in on a scapegoat to blame for deflategate, Saturday Night Live and Bill Nye weighed in over the weekend on the scandal. SNL’s cold open recreated the Patriots’ press conference with Beck Bennett cast as coach Bill Belichick and Taran Killam as quarterback Tom Brady.

“Look, all I know is that a football is a pigskin, so I just assumed that the air in the football is how much air was inside the pig when it died.”

— Taran Killam, as Patriots QB Tom Brady

The ball boy (assistant equipment co-manager, to be precise) serves as the fall guy in SNL’s parody — a scenario that looks increasingly likely to play out in real life.

DEFLATEGATE SCIENCE

The science behind deflategate, or lack thereof, provided Bill Nye “The Science Guy” with the perfect opportunity to school Belichick. Alas, Nye failed to cite the ideal gas law and instead squeezed a couple of balloons embellished with football laces drawn with markers.

Other investigators came to a very different conclusion than Nye’s, bolstering the argument that atmosphere alone could be a plausible cause of deflation. HeadSmart Labs’ scientists — or at least guys dresses in lab coats — were able to achieve nearly two pounds of pressure loss in the football just by moving it to a cooler room and soaking it in cold water.