Yea I know, in the grand scheme of things deflategate is silly trivial stuff, but this is interesting. Might be good for a little idle chatter at some Super Bowl Party on Sunday when you need to stay clear of politics.
I have been curious why this angle of the story has not gained more traction.
The delategate "scandal" such as it is has to do with slightly deflated footballs used during the first half of the Patriot's game against the Colts a week and a half ago. The game got the Patriots to the Super Bowl (again). It has emerged that 11 out of the 12 footballs the Patriots were using in the first half were slightly deflated. Why does that matter? Because a slightly deflated football is easier to catch and to hold on to, creating a subtle advantage.
The Patriots went on to win that game against the Colts in a blowout, no question has been raised about the footballs they used in the second half when the Patriots scored most of their points. But still questions are raised, were they fudging?
But now, it gets a little more interesting.
You see it seems that way back in 2007, Tom Brady began pushing for a change to the League rules. It used to be that the home team always supplied the footballs, so both sides used the same balls. What Tom Brady wanted was for each team to supply their own footballs, and that change was in fact made.
And then something happened. Suddenly the Patriots began to lose the ball to fumbles far less often than their opponents did. Credit for noticing this goes to Warren Sharpwho began blogging this several days ago.
What happened is this. Once that rule change happened the Patriots suddenly began to lose the ball on fumbles far less than before, far less that any other team in the NFL. And that happened consistently year in and year out for the last seven years. I first saw this on the Huffington Post (Stats Show the New England Patriots Became Nearly Fumble-Proof After 2006 Rule Change Proposed by Tom Brady
Now the story is spreading, picked up by Slate.
The Patriots became nearly fumble-proof after a 2006 rule change backed by Tom Brady.
In politics I spend a lot of time looking at numbers. These numbers are very interesting and compelling.
To quote: To confirm something was dramatically different in New England, starting in 2007 and running through the present, I compared the 2000–06 time period (when the Patriots won all of their Super Bowls) with the 2007–2014 time period. The beauty of data is that results speak for themselves......
This chart is jaw-dropping, and the visual perfectly depicts what happened. From a more technical perspective, John Candido, a data scientist at ZestFinance who is a colleague of mine over at the NFLproject.com website and was also involved in the development of this research, comments:
Based on the assumption that plays per fumble follow a normal distribution, you’d expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten since 2007 once in 5,842 instances.
Which in layman’s terms means that this result only being a coincidence is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0001711874 probability to win. In other words, it’s very unlikely that results this abnormal are only due to the endogenous nature of the game.
While these data do not prove the Patriots deflated footballs starting in 2007, we know they were interested in gaining control of their own footballs in 2006.
Very interesting.
Today the Cincinnati Enquirer picked the story up with regard to BenJarvus Green-Ellis who signed with the Bengals leaving the Patriots in 2012 as a free agent. He got $9 million, he'd handled the ball for the Patriots 588 times without a fumble and the Bengals thought they had a winner.
So what happened next? Over the next two years he handled the ball another 524 times and fumbled five times. Now he's gone, out of football.
As I said in the long run trivial, but some days I like to think about something other than politics. But it will be interesting to see if the Patriots suddenly start fumbling on Sunday and next year.
But back to politics. If this is all true, it began during a time when the banks and Wall Street were also fixing the game (not that they still aren't), the ethos was a little different back then.