100ppp, and I had to read through page 4 (that's 100 posts for you folks counting at home) in order to make sure this wasn't already posted. So I had to wade through the monkey's throwing poo at each other, which is why I should have gone with my first impulse, which was, "Re-post? I don't care."
Anyway, I have no strong opinion, no skin in this game, but I found this article quite interesting:
The New England Patriots Prevention of Fumbles is Nearly Impossible.
For starters Brady throws the ball where his receiver can catch and control the ball before he takes a hit, it's called accuracy. Secondly the Patriots move the ball using a LOT of short passes and Brady gets it out as fast as anyone, that eliminates the possibility of strip-sacks and when he does see a defender bearing down on him he's quick to get to the ground. Also BB is notorious for benching players who fumble, just ask Steven Ridley who was benched for multiple games in a row for fumbling. I find it hard to believe that the under-inflated ball issue could slip past so many teams, Refs, players for 7 years without anyone noticing it, makes zero sense to me.
Again, I have no skin in this game, but all that you just wrote
doesn't even begin to account for this, from the article:
One can CLEARLY SEE the Patriots, visually, are off the chart. There is no other team even close to being near to their rate of 187 offensive plays (passes+rushes+sacks) per fumble. The league average is 105 plays/fumble. Most teams are within 21 plays of that number.
I spoke with a data scientist who I know from work on the NFLproject.com website, and sent him the data. He said:
Based on the assumption that fumbles per play follow a normal distribution, youd expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten over this period, once in 16,233.77 instances.
Which in laymans terms means that this result only being a coincidence, is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0000616 probability to win. Which in other words, its very unlikely that its a coincidence.
Now, from what others have pointed out here, it
seems like tailoring your balls to your QB is a common, nearly league-wide occurrence. And, has been also pointed out, whatever happened in last week's game had zero effect on the outcome.
Still, you know and I know that now that the NFL is "shocked, shocked I say" to discover that balls have probably been tampered with, the Patriots will be sanctioned. A fine, the loss of a high draft pick, an alteration in pre-game ball custody, and maybe then we can all get on with our lives.
Btw, this gets my vote for best link in this entire thread:
We are indeed, at so many times and in so many respects, a nation of infantilized yahoos!
