Why does the NFL allow each team to supply its own footballs?

Mike Bianchi asks in the Orlando Sentinel,

Did the NFL look the other way for years while quarterbacks used performance-inducing balls much like MLB had its head buried in the on-deck circle while sluggers brazenly bulked up on performance-enhancing drugs?

Why do you think the league listened to Brady, Manning and the NFL's other top quarterbacks back in 2006 when they successfully lobbied the league for a rule change that would allow each team to supply its own footballs? Do you think the Competition Committee would have listened if the league's top cornerbacks or linebackers had lobbied them?

"The thing is, every quarterback likes it [the ball[ a little bit different," Brady told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel back in 2006. "Some like them blown up a little bit more, some like them a little more thin, some like them a little more new, some like them really broken in."

And some like them illegally deflated, too, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Good grief, allowing NFL quarterbacks to supply their own balls would be like allowing NASCAR crew chiefs to supply their own restrictor plates. Except the NFL — like Major League Baseball with steroids — wants us to believe now that it had no earthly idea players and teams might actually cheat to gain an unfair advantage.

The most under-reported story during the entire Deflategate saga came when the Tampa Bay Times reported in January that former Tampa Bay Bucs quarterback Brad Johnson bribed some ball boys and paid them $7,500 to scuff up the balls that were used during Tampa Bay's 2003 Super Bowl victory over the Oakland Raiders.

"I paid some guys off to get the balls right," Johnson told the Times. "I went and got all 100 footballs, and they took care of all of them."

Sorry, but I simply cannot believe a multi-billion-dollar industry like the NFL is so stupid that it couldn't foresee cheating when it allowed its most important piece of equipment — the actual ball itself — to be supplied by the two participating teams. And it certainly doesn't make any sense that the league would leave its precious Super Bowl balls in the care of some poor schlubs who can be bought off for $7,500.

...The NFL's performance-inducing balls are no different than MLB's performance-enhancing drugs. Football fans loved seeing Manning and Brady setting offensive records just as baseball fans loved seeing McGwire and Sosa chasing home run records.

Hulked-up players bulked up baseball's bottom line just as deflated balls induced football's inflated TV ratings.

Read more here.