At least the current NFL balls-up gives sportswriters and TV bloviators something to write and talk about in that hard-to-fill two weeks before the actual ball game. Some of the most tedious sports coverage on the planet takes place in this over-long run-up.

For me the central question is if the footballs were deflated enough to make a difference, how come the officials who handled them all day didn’t notice this and throw them out of the game? And my main fear is that Roger Goodell, hoping to prove that his own balls aren’t soft, will over-discipline in this case.

I don’t have a dog in the Super-Bowl hunt. But I think it would be wildly excessive to bar Pats coach Bill Belichick from the sidelines on Super-Day, as the easily excitable Tampa Tribune sports columnist Martin Fennelly called for this morning. Steady on, Marty. Take a few deep breaths.

What astonishes me about this deflated football affair with the New England Patriots is the fact that each team is allowed to supply a dozen of its own game balls. 

Yes, the referees have custody of the balls until 10 minutes before kick off. But if this is an issue then why not have the refs supply and keep custody of the balls during the entire game just as umpires do in baseball?

Yet this raises another question. If teams can supply their own balls and deflating them makes it easier to pass around then why haven't more teams done this before?

I mean pitchers aren't supposed to scuff baseballs, but it doesn't stop them from doing it or at least make hitters think they are doing it.

Honestly, I think this is much ado about nothing. The Pats were better than the Colts, deflated balls or no deflated balls. If the Seahawks are as good as everybody thinks they are then this shouldn't bother them at all. But if visions of deflated balls get in the heads of the Seahawks then the Pats will prevail.

Last night, the White House laid off the general #WaronWomen rhetoric, since they no longer need single women under the age of 35 to vote for them in droves in order to "save their birth control," as though anyone was physically stopping them from filling a prescription at Wal-Mart. The President did, however, touch on the subject of "pay equity," playing on the tried-and-true assumption that women in the workforce make less than men do, which persists despite all evidence to the contrary.

In a "won't you think about the ladies?" moment, the President urged Congress to pass a bill that would demand pay equity, even though there are already laws against discrimination on the books, and overall merit pay discrepancies between the genders is due largely to union and government influence. Unfortunately, even if you were screaming this impotently at the television screen, you could hardly make a dent in the administration's self-satisfaction. Which is why watching Carly Fiorina lay waste to White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett on this exact subject, using these exact talking points, live on MSNBC's Morning Joe is totally worth it. 

To be honest, I was approximately as jazzed to spend an hour listening to the President yammer on about his policy agenda as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and given her noted history of pre-gaming the event, probably just as drunk. But regardless, in selfless stewardship to the public interest, I watched the whole thing, paid attention through most of it, and only flipped the channel once to check out whether the Travel Channel had a show on that would send my OCD into overdrive. I flipped back because it was something about RVs and camping isn't exactly my forte. Even in an RV.