At least one football manufacturer is readying for the post-Deflategate era.
Big Game USA, the Dallas-based company that is the leading maker of footballs used at the collegiate level, is developing a ball with a built-in pressure gauge. When the ball is inflated to 12.5 pounds per square inch, a mechanical sensor detects it. When that happens, a "V" -- which stands for "vairify," a play on words between "verify" and "air" -- pops up into a small display screen on the ball.
"We haven't heard from the NCAA or any of the teams we supply footballs to that this is going to happen at the collegiate level," Chris Calandro, owner of Big Game USA, told ESPN.com. "But we want to be prepared if it does."
A spokesman for Wilson, which has the official ball deal with the NFL, could not immediately be reached to comment on whether the company is working on a similar idea.
Calandro said his company, which makes both Nike- and Adidas-branded footballs, is on the first version of its patent-pending idea and could take until the fall of 2016 to offer the product. The innovative product could encourage all colleges to use Big Game USA's balls if they wanted the testing to be universal. As it now stands, each team uses its own balls (sometimes by different manufacturers) to play with while on offense, so teams technically would be testing only themselves.
While the college game hasn't had a controversy on the scale of Deflategate, one of USC's student managers was found to have deflated footballs in a 2012 game against Oregon. The student manager told Pac-12 investigators that he had done it without the knowledge of anyone on the team. He was later fired.
NCAA rules call for the game balls to be new or nearly new, have a ball pressure of between 12.5 and 13.5 psi, and weigh between 14 and 15 ounces. Calandro says his current prototype doesn't read if a ball is inflated above 13.5 psi, but the company is working on it.
Big Game USA started to get into the technology side last year when it offered balls that had chips in them to collegiate teams so they could know about the manufacturing of the ball and scan it into their inventory system to track which ones were used for which games. Five teams, including Nebraska and Mississippi State, used the balls last year, and another 10 will use them this year, Calandro said.