The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible
slate.com
slate.com
Of the backs that fumbled in 2012, only Woodhead is gone. He fumbled only once.
Two backs fumbled in 2011, once each. Woodhead (who is gone) and Ridley, who is still a Patriot.
Patriot backs simply don't fumble. Brady and Edelman do, and Welker did a bit. Your explanation isn't supported by the data.
Source. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/nwe/2014.htm
EDIT - I'm not sure my source differentiates fumbles from lost fumbles, although that doesn't seem to impact the conclusion regarding parent's comment.
LeGarrette Blount: 3 fumbles each year with TB Bucs, 2010-2011 & no fumbles in 2012, 3 fumbles with NE Pats, 2013, 1 fumble with Steelers in early 2014, 0 fumbles with NE Pats in late 2014 http://www.nfl.com/player/legarretteblount/497149/profile
Laurance Maroney: 1 fumble in 2006, 4 fumbles in 2009 with NE Pats, 0 fumbles with Den Broncos in 2010 http://www.nfl.com/player/laurencemaroney/2506884/profile
Sammy Morris: I'm not going to summarize his stats, but he has a whole bunch of fumbles with a bunch of teams including NE. http://www.nfl.com/player/sammymorris/2504126/profile
Those are all the running backs I can think of who played for the Patriots and other teams in recent years. I'm not going to bother with Corey Dillion since he was before 2007.
ftr I am a Patriots who hopes that there is no wrong doing but is trying to keep an open mind.
"Your explanation isn't supported by the data": I wasn't trying to give an explanation supported by the data. I was trying to give an explanation for the data that makes sense and is supported by observing the Patriots play.
It's like saying Magnus Carlsen must cheat at chess, because the chance of him making so few errors is effectively zero assuming he makes errors at the rate that other grandmasters do.
I understand that Belichick has a doghouse for backs that fumble. The point seems to be that his doghouse is likely to be rarely occupied since 2007, and whether that is due to coaching, drafting backs with good hands, or something less wholesome.
I appreciate the points on Maroney and Ridley.
Pre-computer era elite GMs and computer-era elite GMs have similar error rates[1], with the caveat that we presume disagreeing with the computer's top choice to be an error. They mostly agreed with the computer's assessment something like 50-57% of the time.
As far as I know Magnus' games haven't been subjected to this kind of analysis, and I recall 2 pretty bad moves in the recent match with Anand, so I'd be interested to see it. I suspect he may be even slightly above 60%.
Should it be something like high 70%'s though I think it would be time to start a conversation about it. It's how Ivanov was busted: overwhelmingly playing one of the top 2 engine moves, which is basically impossible. [2]
1 - http://en.chessbase.com/post/computers-choose-who-was-the-st...
Of course, giving the context of its publication, we know what it's trying to imply.
There are other teams that try really hard to train their players not to fumble, including taking them out until they learn not to fumble. Belichick has been otherworldly good at this training.
The Patriots were not always otherworldly at not fumbling. In fact, this acumen started the same year the NFL changed the rules so that the team was allowed to have full control of the balls after pregame inspection.
This isn't a minor issue. Turnovers are hugely predictive of game outcomes.
The Patriots were caught with deflated footballs. They had deflated footballs for a reason.
By the way, about why the Colts balls didn't deflate: the BC professor says they may have over-inflated them, but I think a simpler explanation is that if the Colts prepared their balls outdoors and they equilibrated to outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs, you would not expect them to deflate. Watch Belichick's press conference today, with an understanding of the ideal gas law, and the fact that working in a ball will also increase the temperature of the gas inside it, and it becomes obvious that if they followed the legal procedure Belichick claimed they followed, the Patriots did not cheat, unless you think having your footballs obey the ideal gas law is cheating.
You are certainly speculating quite a bit here, no? As opposed to assuming the Pats under inflated their balls, intentionally or unintentionally, you are speculating that the Colts over inflated theirs and/or inflated them in a different environment?
Many people are speculating that the Patriots cheated on no grounds except that the balls deflated when taken outdoors, which is exactly what you expect from the laws of physics.
So the thing making people speculate the Patriots cheated is that the Colts' balls didn't deflate, combined with a lack of understanding of the ideal gas law, or a refusal to take it into account.
I take it as a given that the ideal gas law holds. That means that for the Colts' balls not to deflate when going from indoors to outdoors they must have prepared them differently than the Patriots. A simple explanation is that the gas inside their balls had already equilibrated to the outdoors temperatures before the balls were given to the refs (e.g. the Colts threw them around outside). It is speculation, but it seems to me more reasonable than the assumption that the Patriots' and Colts' balls both managed to evade the workings of the ideal gas law, and the Patriots' balls deflated because the Patriots cheated.
There are zero reasons to believe those assumptions are true.
or some reason the Pats balls (at a home game) reacted differently to the same weather conditions
All we know is that the Pats balls were under the limit and the Colts balls met the limit. To my knowledge, there has been nothing released/leaked about any decrease in pressure in the Colts balls, just that they were within the rules.
The Pats may or may not have done something untoward, but the only reason so many people seem to think it's a slam dunk is that they're misinterpreting the information that's out there.
It's exactly what you'd expect from the laws of physics, which is precisely why even if the situation you suggest is the case, the Patriots still knew that the balls would deflate due to the aforementioned extremely predictable laws of physics, and they still cheated.
If they didn't know, then incompetence is no excuse. They cheated because they didn't know about the ideal gas law? They still cheated.
Speculation is all there is at this point. All we know is that the Pats balls were under the NFL regs when measured at halftime and the Colts balls were not. We have no detailed information about the pre-game ball preparation steps for either team, no information about the Colts pressure preference (Belichick stated today that the Pats aim for a target pressure of 12.5 psi), etc.
And yes, the Colts could very well have overinflated their footballs, just as Aaron Rodgers claims to do with his game balls.
And in any case, at best this is a possible explanation for the underinflation. There is no evidence that the explanation you give is true, or even likely, since it rests on totally unsupported assumptions about the conditions under which the teams inflated their balls.
The "evidence" for my explanation is the ideal gas law and what Belichick said his team did in his press conference today. If the Patriots followed that procedure, which there is no reason to believe they didn't, and which is legal, one expects from the ideal gas law that their balls would seem under-inflated at half-time. It's basic physics and easy to understand theoretically and reproduce experimentally.
My speculation for what the Colts did rests on the reports that their balls did not deflate. For that to hold, given the laws of physics, something like the balls equilibrating to the outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs must have happened.
AFAIK, teams are not allowed to reinstall balls during the game, refs can, but they obviously didn't detect it until they measured the pressure at halftime.
Quarterbacks are surely able to detect the lower pressure
Everyone seems to be taking this as a given when it's not at all. There are qb's who can detect it, and others who can't.
http://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/blog/2015/new-england-p...
"But in 2007, something happened to propel [the Patriots] to a much better rate."
The author is using a 5-year average, and then concluding that something must have happened in a single year that is suddenly different. What that implies to me, is that they had a particularly terrible year in 2002. So, when the really bad year slides off of the 5-year moving average, then the 5-year average suddenly looks much better.
Does this happen in baseball/ basketball as well? From an Australian perspective it seems unusual.
I doubt this happens in basketball because the same ball is being handled by numerous people on both teams, so it wouldn't be fair to let one player or team break the ball in to their own preferences. The same would be true of your AFL. In the NFL, teams are using their own broken in balls, and the quarterback is (usually) the only guy who has to actually throw it.
Baseballs only last a couple of pitches and offense/defense are completely different games, so I seriously doubt anyone is allowed to do anything to any ball before the game. When a pitcher gets a new ball it is already pre-rubbed in a special mud, and they can rub it in dirt a bit but they can't put anything that will stick to the ball on it as it gives the pitcher an advantage.
Of course in baseball you'll still occasionally see the pitcher with a hidden "foreign substance" used to doctor the ball once they get ahold of it. Back 20ish years ago it was not too rare for a pitcher to be discovered with a nail file or scratching the ball on their belt buckle. Generally this is seen as "part of the game", and well, there are admitted spitballers/nail-filers in the hall of fame and nobody really cares. Nowadays, if a pitcher gets caught with a "foreign substance" (usually pine tar), they are usually suspended for a few games, the media goes into a frenzy, and retired baseball players say they all did it too.
The ruling seems weird, but that's probably why the NFL allows its teams to supply their own game balls, instead of providing fresh ones for every game.
http://advancednflstats.com/index.php/home/research/general/...
It's not as damning for the Patriots. But very interesting that it suddenly started in 2007, the same year the NFL changed the rules to allow visiting teams to use their own balls.
The OP gets credit for noticing an unusual trend in the data, but does all kinds of weird seat-of-the-pants analysis that I found pretty hard to even look at.
E.g. Sorting the teams by fumble frequency, and then running a regression on the ranked list (!!?); using plays/fumble instead of fumbles/play; reporting stats with the null hypothesis that the Pats fumble rate is drawn randomly from other teams (instead of asking what the likelihood is of an extreme value at least that high).
I'm sure someone will test this out and verify or discredit the claim.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/sports/football/eli-mannin...
[1] http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/extra_points/...
Why does it matter what people do for leisure?
I wonder if anyone is working on this problem?
Despite a few nit picky issues I have with this particular analysis of the Patriots fumble data it's probably the strongest evidence I've seen so far that there has likely been a persistent rules violation.
That's only true if ball inflation tracks with fumbles. There have been lots of assertions that's the case, but I haven't seen any evidence.
Two counter examples:
- If you look at AFCC, that's Patriots had 1 fumble in the first half playing with an underinflated ball in dry weather conditions, and had zero fumbles in the second half playing with properly inflated balls, and in wet conditions.
- Aaron Rodgers is on record stating that he likes his footballs to be inflated as high as possible. But if you look at GB's fumble data in the link, they're #6 behind NE in total fumbles.
There are a whole bunch of confounding variables here, including coaching techniques (look at how Tiki Barber's corrected his fumble problems in one year after coaching changes).
http://i.imgur.com/QP6LXWg.png
The Patriots are not even the top team! It's actually the Falcons that have the most plays per fumble. If it's "nearly impossible" for the Patriots, what does that say about the Falcons? The author focuses on "fumbles lost" because that number is more dramatic if one is trying to prove that the Patriots did something wrong. That number in isolation only shows that the Patriots were extremely good at recovering their own fumbles.
Looking at the graph, there is a notable bend at the top 4 teams. Either the top 4 teams have fewer fumbles through training, or the top 4 teams are all cheating somehow. It's hard to call the Patriots statistics impossible when they're in 2nd place.
Interceptions and recoveries would be by defensive players, who would spend much less time focusing on ball handling since they rarely carry the ball.
My point is: We don't need to identify the person responsible, and we don't need a confession. Guilt is obvious, a priori. Punishment should be swift.