Patriots being investigated after Colts game (4 Viewers)

[AB in DC]

There's enough rumor, inneundo, half-truths, and flawed logic in the Wells Report itself. Yet everyone insists on adding even more. Way beyond the conclusions of the report itself. This is the definition of mob rule.

 

[rockaction]

Metaphysical question: If a Pats fan keeps asserting untruths and declaring things in a thread, will anyone believe it or be around to read it?

You guys can probably answer that.

 

[geoff8695]

If it did not give Tom an advantage, then why would the team risk doing this repeatedly? This wasn't them submitting under-inflated balls and then say ah shucks if the refs caught it. It was the team altering the balls after they were inspected. That's cheating.

The texts point to a long-standing issue with the Patriots deflating the balls after the referees inspected them. I think the corked bat analogy is perfect. Brady was using performance enhancing equipment. Equipment below acceptable tolerances to fit his smallish hands. This also aided him, the RBs and pass catchers in bad weather where gripping a below standard football is an advantage. The fumble stats bear this out.

Had this been something that came out of left field and we did not know if it was a first time occurrence or not, then I could see a slap on the wrist. But the texts point to a long-time abuse of said rules. One of the guys has the nickname "deflator". Pretty certain this happened more than once (and possibly for as long as 6-7 years). The Colts asked the league to look into this BEFORE the game was even played and like clockwork, the Patriots were caught with altered footballs.

It will be interesting to see if history judges him the same way it does the other top performers who did everything to win (Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds come to mind).

the bolded is entirely wrong, and tells me you didn't actually read the document -- not that I'd fault anybody on that.

I didn't waste time reading 240 pages of nonsense, either, but I at least read and reposted parts of it before offering up an opinion on those particular parts.

the fumble thing has been debunked and is now basically out there with bigfoot in the realm of urban legend just past imaginationland --- as tends to happen to most of the half-assed cooked up criticisms of the pats.

the rest of your post is really nothing other than assumptions and slanderous opinion based on some apparent hard on for the pats.

being a fan of such a successful team maybe I don't have the frustration and negativity that produces this kind of hate for some other team, so I can't really fault you on that, although I'm kind of surprised you'd waste time trolling fans of a team for reaction on your own site.

btw, I really don't understand that 'hard on for _____' expression --- if you had a hard on for something wouldn't that mean that you liked and wanted it?

Did you see the multiple texts made public, which were sent from Patriots owned cell phones between Jastremski and McNally dating back to a year ago referring to Brady as "deflator" and joking about going to ESPN (presumably to rat him out since he was such a d-bag about properly deflating footballs)?

Do you not remember Brady lying about his level of contact/involvement with these guys, pretending to not even know who handles the footballs despite repeatedly calling/texting McNally directly on one of said Patriots owned cell phones? Pretty strange to have a guy you don't even know on speed dial like that don't ya think?

I don't really care whether the Patriots and/or Brady get punished or not by the NFL. I understand that cheating takes place in professional sports all the time.

I just can't stomach blind homerism by fans of a team/athlete that goes so far as to make excuses for lies and cheating when it is found out. If a team I root for gets busted for cheating you won't find me making excuses for them and trying to rationalize it away...

 

[12punch]

Metaphysical question: If a Pats fan keeps asserting untruths and declaring things in a thread, will anyone believe it or be around to read it?

You guys can probably answer that.

based on 166 pages it looks like certain people will most definitely be around to read it.

probably 'til they're in the grave

 

[geoff8695]

If it did not give Tom an advantage, then why would the team risk doing this repeatedly? This wasn't them submitting under-inflated balls and then say ah shucks if the refs caught it. It was the team altering the balls after they were inspected. That's cheating.

The texts point to a long-standing issue with the Patriots deflating the balls after the referees inspected them. I think the corked bat analogy is perfect. Brady was using performance enhancing equipment. Equipment below acceptable tolerances to fit his smallish hands. This also aided him, the RBs and pass catchers in bad weather where gripping a below standard football is an advantage. The fumble stats bear that out.

'The team' didnt do anything, if you believe the report. Brady and his two stooges, as far as we know, were the only ones involved.The fumble study was debunked. Repeatedly.

I'm sure it's been posted before but do you have any issues with this article, A Last Look at NEs Fumbles?

Doesn't sound to me like it's been debunked - but it does sound like you can choose to view this issue through rose colored glasses if you so desire...

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Also from your link:

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?"

Indeed. Moreover, NE is a good football team, in respects undeniable and not attributable to football inflation. There is a Wyatt Earp fallacy at work here. You should EXPECT the best team of the last decade to have unusual positive statistics compared to less successful teams.

Well that was taken from the portion of the article that stated "READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT" so let's put it in proper context then shall we?

Here's the entirety so neither of us can be accused of selective editing:

The recent debunking and de-debunking of the Patriots' fumble numbers has taken a decidedly unscientific turn. The posts I've read seem to be "advocacy" research, not unlike research sponsored by Nabisco claiming that Oreos are good for you. Each side's biases and contortions aren't very hard to detect. I think that the possibility that the fumble rates may be connected to the current allegations warrants some fair-minded investigation. Some of the debunking has merit, but some of it does not. Whether NE appears to be a 4-sigma outlier or an 8-sigma outlier is beside the point. Without knowing who to trust, I thought I'd go a step further with my own look into the numbers.Instead of slicing the data this way and that--by year, by dome/outdoor, home/away, elite-QB teams and non-elite QB teams, or whatever--let's allow the numbers to speak for themselves. We won't exclude certain teams or years. We'll design a simple model that can account for all of these factors. It seems to me that the debate boils down to two primary considerations: Should dome teams be compared with outdoor teams? And, does the fact that the NE offense is normally very good anyway account for their level of ball security?

I ran a linear regression to predict how many fumbles we should expect of an offense. The predicted number of fumbles isn't really what we're after. It's the error of the model. If one team or another is consistently defying the odds with superior ball security even after accounting for the variables that are likely to explain low fumble rates, that might revise our suspicion that NE has enjoyed some kind of advantage. Some of you more sophisticated readers might pooh-pooh linear regression, but it does have its uses, and I think this is a good one.

The model predicts the total number of offensive (special teams is excluded) fumbles based on each team's completions, incompletions, sacks, and run attempts. Each of these play types have uniquely different probabilities of fumbling, so teams with high numbers of some and low numbers of other play types should be expected to have their fumble numbers vary accordingly. These variables are intended to account for the nature and quality of each offense and its players. This also means that fumble "rate" is implicitly accounted for. In other words, more plays would naturally mean more chances to fumble.

Additionally, the model accounts for a team's home stadium type (indoor or outdoor). Instead of including or excluding certain teams, the regression will give us a fair estimate of how much playing in a dome helps a team's fumble rates. I also included year in the model because fumble rates have been declining league-wide since 2000. Without accounting for this trend, it would appear that all recent teams are fumbling less than expected.

I also created an alternate specification of the model. I thought that the indoor/outdoor dummy variable might be too blunt and not really capture the actual playing conditions based on climate or even field turf type. Some environments make fumbling much more likely than others, such as wet, muddy or extremely cold conditions. Instead of indoor/outdoor, I used a variable for each team's opponent's number of fumbles. (Just fumbles from the games in which they played each other, not season-long totals for every opponent.) The idea is that opponent fumbles are a fair way of gauging each game environment's "fumblerificness." For any one game there's a lot of randomness, but in aggregate it might be a clever way of looking at things.

Here are the results for the first specification (indoor/outdoor). Each cell tells us how many more or fewer fumbles a team actually had compared to how many we would expect. Teams with much fewer fumbles than expected are in green and those with much more than expected are in red. I have deliberately not sorted the table or emphasized NE in any way.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected

Here are the results using opponent fumbles as a control for game environment. Not much difference. In fact, when I switch windows back and forth on each table, the color codes barely change.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected (Opponent Fumble Spec.)

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?

You can see that the model used may not completely account for QB "eliteness." Brady's best years came since 2007, and you can see the Manning-led Colts had impressive fumble over-performance for a certain period. Drew Brees' Saints seem to have a similar pattern.

NE actually had 3 more fumbles than we'd expect in 2013, breaking the string of consecutive seasons with fewer than expected fumbles.

The results show that indoor/outdoor considerations aren't that important. It's improper to throw out all the dome teams.

Bill Belichick is known to be very focused on ball security. He is very conscious of ball conditions during practice and deliberately makes his players practice with balls in poor condition. He quickly benches players who fumble, and even cuts or releases them. We should expect NE to have good fumble numbers.

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE THERE'S SOMETHING FISHY GOING ON

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Regarding ATL, yes, they are also very good with ball security. Should they be investigated too? Possibly, but I wouldn't start an investigation or make an accusation on statistics alone. The bottom line is that nothing here rules out the possibility other teams also tamper with their footballs.

The timing of the sudden improvement is suspicious. Just a year into the new rules, NE goes from being average overall and having just about the number of fumbles we would expect given their offensive style to being the absolute best in the league.

NE's over-performance cannot be explained by Brady's skills or his "eliteness." Brady was the same person before and after the rule change, but his team's fumble numbers didn't change until after. Further, when certifiably non-elite Matt Cassel had the reigns in '08, NE had equally impressive over-performance as any other year in the post-rule-change period. Those considerations plus the fact that the model accounts for run-pass balance, completion percentage and sacks disproves the "Brady is just that good" argument.

PS Ever notice that Brady underperformed his usual self in the two Super Bowls since the rule change? What's different about those games? The league provides all the balls.

WHAT DO I THINK?

First, I believe we should have very strong evidence before making accusations about cheating or ethical violations whether we're talking about football or any other endeavor. Statistics alone could never be expected to provide that level of evidence.

Regarding the two main questions of the analysis, I'm split. I agree that throwing out all the indoor teams appears to be premature. Indoor teams do fumble less frequently but not by enough to throw them out of the comparison entirely. The model says indoor teams have under 1 fumble per year less than others, accounting for the other predictors. That's not enough to explain why ATL and NO also fumble relatively infrequently.

On the other hand, I think this model shows that the basic nature and quality of the NE offense doesn't fully explain their over-performance. But that is tempered by the fact that there are certainly other factors the model doesn't capture.

I admit I'm also sympathetic to what I'd call the maximum likelihood explanation. Which alternative explanation is the evidence most consistent with? For those of you statisticians out there, think of it as Bayesian parameter fitting. The parameter is the range of possible explanations, i.e. "the truth:" (NE tampered, NE did not tamper). Which of these theories does the data best fit? But it's not completely clear to me which way things lean. I guess it depends on how cynical you are.

To be honest, I'm not as interested in the statistical issue at hand as I am in the epistemological considerations surrounding it. There's a difference between wondering how often any NFL team might be so fortunate with fumbles, and wondering how likely NE itself might be so fortunate in a certain period of time. It's not like we're scanning the stats of all 32 teams to find unusual patterns over any period and then making accusations of improper behavior. In this case, the accusations already exist based on non-statistical evidence and we're scanning NE's stats in a certain period to see if they're consistent or inconsistent with the accusations. Those are very different questions, and given the same data, yield very different answers.At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

Note:

1. Regression results pasted below.

2. I also ran specifications where year was a set of dummy (0/1) variables. This did not change the results meaningfully, so I kept the simpler version with year as a linear predictor.

Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + indoor, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-17.1969 -3.4299 -0.3501 3.6088 18.3044

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 596.262989 116.293152 5.127 4.30e-07 ***
sk 0.154891 0.023258 6.660 7.67e-11 ***
comp -0.005998 0.004910 -1.222 0.22240
inc 0.027522 0.009647 2.853 0.00452 **
ratt 0.007952 0.003660 2.173 0.03028 *
year -0.292761 0.057957 -5.051 6.29e-07 ***
indoor1 -0.283076 0.586677 -0.483 0.62967
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.266 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1689, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1583
F-statistic: 15.95 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + oppfum, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-16.7713 -3.4957 -0.3868 3.6292 18.4993

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 557.868140 117.670637 4.741 2.82e-06 ***
sk 0.154281 0.023169 6.659 7.70e-11 ***
comp -0.007245 0.004777 -1.517 0.13006
inc 0.025897 0.009656 2.682 0.00757 **
ratt 0.006918 0.003665 1.887 0.05971 .
year -0.273874 0.058624 -4.672 3.90e-06 ***
oppfum 0.087719 0.047598 1.843 0.06597 .
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.248 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1744, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1639
F-statistic: 16.59 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

 

[12punch]

Do you not remember Brady lying about his level of contact/involvement with these guys, pretending to not even know who handles the footballs despite repeatedly calling/texting McNally directly on one of said Patriots owned cell phones? Pretty strange to have a guy you don't even know on speed dial like that don't ya think?

well, seeing as how brady wisely hasn't given up his phone I'm not sure how you'd know if the guy was on speed dial or if brady had to call the other guy to get his number.

pretty strange to make an assumption like that, ya think, buddy?

guy...?

I'll admit I didn't read the 240 pages of nonsense, so I didn't see all those texts back and forth between brady and wtfever you're referring to over the past 5 years

 

[12punch]

If it did not give Tom an advantage, then why would the team risk doing this repeatedly? This wasn't them submitting under-inflated balls and then say ah shucks if the refs caught it. It was the team altering the balls after they were inspected. That's cheating.

The texts point to a long-standing issue with the Patriots deflating the balls after the referees inspected them. I think the corked bat analogy is perfect. Brady was using performance enhancing equipment. Equipment below acceptable tolerances to fit his smallish hands. This also aided him, the RBs and pass catchers in bad weather where gripping a below standard football is an advantage. The fumble stats bear that out.

'The team' didnt do anything, if you believe the report. Brady and his two stooges, as far as we know, were the only ones involved.The fumble study was debunked. Repeatedly.

I'm sure it's been posted before but do you have any issues with this article, A Last Look at NEs Fumbles?

Doesn't sound to me like it's been debunked - but it does sound like you can choose to view this issue through rose colored glasses if you so desire...

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Also from your link:

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?"

Indeed. Moreover, NE is a good football team, in respects undeniable and not attributable to football inflation. There is a Wyatt Earp fallacy at work here. You should EXPECT the best team of the last decade to have unusual positive statistics compared to less successful teams.

Well that was taken from the portion of the article that stated "READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT" so let's put it in proper context then shall we?

Here's the entirety so neither of us can be accused of selective editing:

The recent debunking and de-debunking of the Patriots' fumble numbers has taken a decidedly unscientific turn. The posts I've read seem to be "advocacy" research, not unlike research sponsored by Nabisco claiming that Oreos are good for you. Each side's biases and contortions aren't very hard to detect. I think that the possibility that the fumble rates may be connected to the current allegations warrants some fair-minded investigation. Some of the debunking has merit, but some of it does not. Whether NE appears to be a 4-sigma outlier or an 8-sigma outlier is beside the point. Without knowing who to trust, I thought I'd go a step further with my own look into the numbers.Instead of slicing the data this way and that--by year, by dome/outdoor, home/away, elite-QB teams and non-elite QB teams, or whatever--let's allow the numbers to speak for themselves. We won't exclude certain teams or years. We'll design a simple model that can account for all of these factors. It seems to me that the debate boils down to two primary considerations: Should dome teams be compared with outdoor teams? And, does the fact that the NE offense is normally very good anyway account for their level of ball security?

I ran a linear regression to predict how many fumbles we should expect of an offense. The predicted number of fumbles isn't really what we're after. It's the error of the model. If one team or another is consistently defying the odds with superior ball security even after accounting for the variables that are likely to explain low fumble rates, that might revise our suspicion that NE has enjoyed some kind of advantage. Some of you more sophisticated readers might pooh-pooh linear regression, but it does have its uses, and I think this is a good one.

The model predicts the total number of offensive (special teams is excluded) fumbles based on each team's completions, incompletions, sacks, and run attempts. Each of these play types have uniquely different probabilities of fumbling, so teams with high numbers of some and low numbers of other play types should be expected to have their fumble numbers vary accordingly. These variables are intended to account for the nature and quality of each offense and its players. This also means that fumble "rate" is implicitly accounted for. In other words, more plays would naturally mean more chances to fumble.

Additionally, the model accounts for a team's home stadium type (indoor or outdoor). Instead of including or excluding certain teams, the regression will give us a fair estimate of how much playing in a dome helps a team's fumble rates. I also included year in the model because fumble rates have been declining league-wide since 2000. Without accounting for this trend, it would appear that all recent teams are fumbling less than expected.

I also created an alternate specification of the model. I thought that the indoor/outdoor dummy variable might be too blunt and not really capture the actual playing conditions based on climate or even field turf type. Some environments make fumbling much more likely than others, such as wet, muddy or extremely cold conditions. Instead of indoor/outdoor, I used a variable for each team's opponent's number of fumbles. (Just fumbles from the games in which they played each other, not season-long totals for every opponent.) The idea is that opponent fumbles are a fair way of gauging each game environment's "fumblerificness." For any one game there's a lot of randomness, but in aggregate it might be a clever way of looking at things.

Here are the results for the first specification (indoor/outdoor). Each cell tells us how many more or fewer fumbles a team actually had compared to how many we would expect. Teams with much fewer fumbles than expected are in green and those with much more than expected are in red. I have deliberately not sorted the table or emphasized NE in any way.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected

Here are the results using opponent fumbles as a control for game environment. Not much difference. In fact, when I switch windows back and forth on each table, the color codes barely change.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected (Opponent Fumble Spec.)

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?

You can see that the model used may not completely account for QB "eliteness." Brady's best years came since 2007, and you can see the Manning-led Colts had impressive fumble over-performance for a certain period. Drew Brees' Saints seem to have a similar pattern.

NE actually had 3 more fumbles than we'd expect in 2013, breaking the string of consecutive seasons with fewer than expected fumbles.

The results show that indoor/outdoor considerations aren't that important. It's improper to throw out all the dome teams.

Bill Belichick is known to be very focused on ball security. He is very conscious of ball conditions during practice and deliberately makes his players practice with balls in poor condition. He quickly benches players who fumble, and even cuts or releases them. We should expect NE to have good fumble numbers.

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE THERE'S SOMETHING FISHY GOING ON

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Regarding ATL, yes, they are also very good with ball security. Should they be investigated too? Possibly, but I wouldn't start an investigation or make an accusation on statistics alone. The bottom line is that nothing here rules out the possibility other teams also tamper with their footballs.

The timing of the sudden improvement is suspicious. Just a year into the new rules, NE goes from being average overall and having just about the number of fumbles we would expect given their offensive style to being the absolute best in the league.

NE's over-performance cannot be explained by Brady's skills or his "eliteness." Brady was the same person before and after the rule change, but his team's fumble numbers didn't change until after. Further, when certifiably non-elite Matt Cassel had the reigns in '08, NE had equally impressive over-performance as any other year in the post-rule-change period. Those considerations plus the fact that the model accounts for run-pass balance, completion percentage and sacks disproves the "Brady is just that good" argument.

PS Ever notice that Brady underperformed his usual self in the two Super Bowls since the rule change? What's different about those games? The league provides all the balls.

WHAT DO I THINK?

First, I believe we should have very strong evidence before making accusations about cheating or ethical violations whether we're talking about football or any other endeavor. Statistics alone could never be expected to provide that level of evidence.

Regarding the two main questions of the analysis, I'm split. I agree that throwing out all the indoor teams appears to be premature. Indoor teams do fumble less frequently but not by enough to throw them out of the comparison entirely. The model says indoor teams have under 1 fumble per year less than others, accounting for the other predictors. That's not enough to explain why ATL and NO also fumble relatively infrequently.

On the other hand, I think this model shows that the basic nature and quality of the NE offense doesn't fully explain their over-performance. But that is tempered by the fact that there are certainly other factors the model doesn't capture.

I admit I'm also sympathetic to what I'd call the maximum likelihood explanation. Which alternative explanation is the evidence most consistent with? For those of you statisticians out there, think of it as Bayesian parameter fitting. The parameter is the range of possible explanations, i.e. "the truth:" (NE tampered, NE did not tamper). Which of these theories does the data best fit? But it's not completely clear to me which way things lean. I guess it depends on how cynical you are.

To be honest, I'm not as interested in the statistical issue at hand as I am in the epistemological considerations surrounding it. There's a difference between wondering how often any NFL team might be so fortunate with fumbles, and wondering how likely NE itself might be so fortunate in a certain period of time. It's not like we're scanning the stats of all 32 teams to find unusual patterns over any period and then making accusations of improper behavior. In this case, the accusations already exist based on non-statistical evidence and we're scanning NE's stats in a certain period to see if they're consistent or inconsistent with the accusations. Those are very different questions, and given the same data, yield very different answers.At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

Note:

1. Regression results pasted below.

2. I also ran specifications where year was a set of dummy (0/1) variables. This did not change the results meaningfully, so I kept the simpler version with year as a linear predictor.

Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + indoor, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-17.1969 -3.4299 -0.3501 3.6088 18.3044

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 596.262989 116.293152 5.127 4.30e-07 ***
sk 0.154891 0.023258 6.660 7.67e-11 ***
comp -0.005998 0.004910 -1.222 0.22240
inc 0.027522 0.009647 2.853 0.00452 **
ratt 0.007952 0.003660 2.173 0.03028 *
year -0.292761 0.057957 -5.051 6.29e-07 ***
indoor1 -0.283076 0.586677 -0.483 0.62967
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.266 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1689, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1583
F-statistic: 15.95 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + oppfum, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-16.7713 -3.4957 -0.3868 3.6292 18.4993

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 557.868140 117.670637 4.741 2.82e-06 ***
sk 0.154281 0.023169 6.659 7.70e-11 ***
comp -0.007245 0.004777 -1.517 0.13006
inc 0.025897 0.009656 2.682 0.00757 **
ratt 0.006918 0.003665 1.887 0.05971 .
year -0.273874 0.058624 -4.672 3.90e-06 ***
oppfum 0.087719 0.047598 1.843 0.06597 .
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.248 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1744, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1639
F-statistic: 16.59 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

do you even link, bro?

 

[mbuehner]

Also from your link:

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?"

Indeed. Moreover, NE is a good football team, in respects undeniable and not attributable to football inflation. There is a Wyatt Earp fallacy at work here. You should EXPECT the best team of the last decade to have unusual positive statistics compared to less successful teams.

well, I think the zinger is filtering out dome teams, or something like that --- I read however many months ago.

if I remember, there's some site, or some post debunking it fairly extensively, if you've seen that.

Warren Sharp decided to exclude dome teams, even when they were playing outdoors. It just so happened (by sheer coincidence surely) that the Vikings had fumbling stats very close to the Patriots when playing outdoors... and the Falcons actually had BETTER fumbling stats over the period in question. Its bad enough to cherry pick data, but when you do it in a way that has no logical underpinning and it turns out the doing so is the only reason your analysis works, youre basically cheating. Ahem. (there was also all kinds of other problems, including kicking game data etc).

The problem is that there is this meme that the Patriots fumbling had been statistically almost impossible, and that just isnt true. Its still, very, very good, but its not even the best of all the teams in the NFL. Thats a problem unless you intend to indict Atlanta for cheating.

 

[rockaction]

I think the reason he didn't link was because the other guy lied about the link's contents. Sort of like the shady stuff you pulled before about the "media" when it was Tedy Bruschi.

Now this has become trolling.

 

[cstu]

I'll admit I didn't read the 240 pages of nonsense, so I didn't see all those texts back and forth between brady and wtfever you're referring to over the past 5 years

 

[mbuehner]

At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

This is where he runs in to trouble. I'm not sure how you can acknowledge that the Patriots have been a very successful team over this time period, and that fumbling cant come close to accounting for that, and then remark that their success in ball security is indeed oddly (but not unprecedentedly) excellent. I'm sure there are many statistics that the Patriots excel in that you surely cant relate to air pressure in a football. This comes down to causality vs correlation. If, say, the Patriots are one of the top teams in least pre-snap penalties over that period... is it because the ball is under-inflated? There's your problem. You should expect the Pats to fumble less, based on their being a successful team.

 

[geoff8695]

If it did not give Tom an advantage, then why would the team risk doing this repeatedly? This wasn't them submitting under-inflated balls and then say ah shucks if the refs caught it. It was the team altering the balls after they were inspected. That's cheating.

The texts point to a long-standing issue with the Patriots deflating the balls after the referees inspected them. I think the corked bat analogy is perfect. Brady was using performance enhancing equipment. Equipment below acceptable tolerances to fit his smallish hands. This also aided him, the RBs and pass catchers in bad weather where gripping a below standard football is an advantage. The fumble stats bear that out.

'The team' didnt do anything, if you believe the report. Brady and his two stooges, as far as we know, were the only ones involved.The fumble study was debunked. Repeatedly.

I'm sure it's been posted before but do you have any issues with this article, A Last Look at NEs Fumbles?

Doesn't sound to me like it's been debunked - but it does sound like you can choose to view this issue through rose colored glasses if you so desire...

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Also from your link:

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?"

Indeed. Moreover, NE is a good football team, in respects undeniable and not attributable to football inflation. There is a Wyatt Earp fallacy at work here. You should EXPECT the best team of the last decade to have unusual positive statistics compared to less successful teams.

Well that was taken from the portion of the article that stated "READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT" so let's put it in proper context then shall we?

Here's the entirety so neither of us can be accused of selective editing:

The recent debunking and de-debunking of the Patriots' fumble numbers has taken a decidedly unscientific turn. The posts I've read seem to be "advocacy" research, not unlike research sponsored by Nabisco claiming that Oreos are good for you. Each side's biases and contortions aren't very hard to detect. I think that the possibility that the fumble rates may be connected to the current allegations warrants some fair-minded investigation. Some of the debunking has merit, but some of it does not. Whether NE appears to be a 4-sigma outlier or an 8-sigma outlier is beside the point. Without knowing who to trust, I thought I'd go a step further with my own look into the numbers.Instead of slicing the data this way and that--by year, by dome/outdoor, home/away, elite-QB teams and non-elite QB teams, or whatever--let's allow the numbers to speak for themselves. We won't exclude certain teams or years. We'll design a simple model that can account for all of these factors. It seems to me that the debate boils down to two primary considerations: Should dome teams be compared with outdoor teams? And, does the fact that the NE offense is normally very good anyway account for their level of ball security?

I ran a linear regression to predict how many fumbles we should expect of an offense. The predicted number of fumbles isn't really what we're after. It's the error of the model. If one team or another is consistently defying the odds with superior ball security even after accounting for the variables that are likely to explain low fumble rates, that might revise our suspicion that NE has enjoyed some kind of advantage. Some of you more sophisticated readers might pooh-pooh linear regression, but it does have its uses, and I think this is a good one.

The model predicts the total number of offensive (special teams is excluded) fumbles based on each team's completions, incompletions, sacks, and run attempts. Each of these play types have uniquely different probabilities of fumbling, so teams with high numbers of some and low numbers of other play types should be expected to have their fumble numbers vary accordingly. These variables are intended to account for the nature and quality of each offense and its players. This also means that fumble "rate" is implicitly accounted for. In other words, more plays would naturally mean more chances to fumble.

Additionally, the model accounts for a team's home stadium type (indoor or outdoor). Instead of including or excluding certain teams, the regression will give us a fair estimate of how much playing in a dome helps a team's fumble rates. I also included year in the model because fumble rates have been declining league-wide since 2000. Without accounting for this trend, it would appear that all recent teams are fumbling less than expected.

I also created an alternate specification of the model. I thought that the indoor/outdoor dummy variable might be too blunt and not really capture the actual playing conditions based on climate or even field turf type. Some environments make fumbling much more likely than others, such as wet, muddy or extremely cold conditions. Instead of indoor/outdoor, I used a variable for each team's opponent's number of fumbles. (Just fumbles from the games in which they played each other, not season-long totals for every opponent.) The idea is that opponent fumbles are a fair way of gauging each game environment's "fumblerificness." For any one game there's a lot of randomness, but in aggregate it might be a clever way of looking at things.

Here are the results for the first specification (indoor/outdoor). Each cell tells us how many more or fewer fumbles a team actually had compared to how many we would expect. Teams with much fewer fumbles than expected are in green and those with much more than expected are in red. I have deliberately not sorted the table or emphasized NE in any way.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected

Here are the results using opponent fumbles as a control for game environment. Not much difference. In fact, when I switch windows back and forth on each table, the color codes barely change.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected (Opponent Fumble Spec.)

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?

You can see that the model used may not completely account for QB "eliteness." Brady's best years came since 2007, and you can see the Manning-led Colts had impressive fumble over-performance for a certain period. Drew Brees' Saints seem to have a similar pattern.

NE actually had 3 more fumbles than we'd expect in 2013, breaking the string of consecutive seasons with fewer than expected fumbles.

The results show that indoor/outdoor considerations aren't that important. It's improper to throw out all the dome teams.

Bill Belichick is known to be very focused on ball security. He is very conscious of ball conditions during practice and deliberately makes his players practice with balls in poor condition. He quickly benches players who fumble, and even cuts or releases them. We should expect NE to have good fumble numbers.

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE THERE'S SOMETHING FISHY GOING ON

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Regarding ATL, yes, they are also very good with ball security. Should they be investigated too? Possibly, but I wouldn't start an investigation or make an accusation on statistics alone. The bottom line is that nothing here rules out the possibility other teams also tamper with their footballs.

The timing of the sudden improvement is suspicious. Just a year into the new rules, NE goes from being average overall and having just about the number of fumbles we would expect given their offensive style to being the absolute best in the league.

NE's over-performance cannot be explained by Brady's skills or his "eliteness." Brady was the same person before and after the rule change, but his team's fumble numbers didn't change until after. Further, when certifiably non-elite Matt Cassel had the reigns in '08, NE had equally impressive over-performance as any other year in the post-rule-change period. Those considerations plus the fact that the model accounts for run-pass balance, completion percentage and sacks disproves the "Brady is just that good" argument.

PS Ever notice that Brady underperformed his usual self in the two Super Bowls since the rule change? What's different about those games? The league provides all the balls.

WHAT DO I THINK?

First, I believe we should have very strong evidence before making accusations about cheating or ethical violations whether we're talking about football or any other endeavor. Statistics alone could never be expected to provide that level of evidence.

Regarding the two main questions of the analysis, I'm split. I agree that throwing out all the indoor teams appears to be premature. Indoor teams do fumble less frequently but not by enough to throw them out of the comparison entirely. The model says indoor teams have under 1 fumble per year less than others, accounting for the other predictors. That's not enough to explain why ATL and NO also fumble relatively infrequently.

On the other hand, I think this model shows that the basic nature and quality of the NE offense doesn't fully explain their over-performance. But that is tempered by the fact that there are certainly other factors the model doesn't capture.

I admit I'm also sympathetic to what I'd call the maximum likelihood explanation. Which alternative explanation is the evidence most consistent with? For those of you statisticians out there, think of it as Bayesian parameter fitting. The parameter is the range of possible explanations, i.e. "the truth:" (NE tampered, NE did not tamper). Which of these theories does the data best fit? But it's not completely clear to me which way things lean. I guess it depends on how cynical you are.

To be honest, I'm not as interested in the statistical issue at hand as I am in the epistemological considerations surrounding it. There's a difference between wondering how often any NFL team might be so fortunate with fumbles, and wondering how likely NE itself might be so fortunate in a certain period of time. It's not like we're scanning the stats of all 32 teams to find unusual patterns over any period and then making accusations of improper behavior. In this case, the accusations already exist based on non-statistical evidence and we're scanning NE's stats in a certain period to see if they're consistent or inconsistent with the accusations. Those are very different questions, and given the same data, yield very different answers.At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

Note:

1. Regression results pasted below.

2. I also ran specifications where year was a set of dummy (0/1) variables. This did not change the results meaningfully, so I kept the simpler version with year as a linear predictor.

Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + indoor, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-17.1969 -3.4299 -0.3501 3.6088 18.3044

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 596.262989 116.293152 5.127 4.30e-07 ***
sk 0.154891 0.023258 6.660 7.67e-11 ***
comp -0.005998 0.004910 -1.222 0.22240
inc 0.027522 0.009647 2.853 0.00452 **
ratt 0.007952 0.003660 2.173 0.03028 *
year -0.292761 0.057957 -5.051 6.29e-07 ***
indoor1 -0.283076 0.586677 -0.483 0.62967
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.266 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1689, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1583
F-statistic: 15.95 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + oppfum, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-16.7713 -3.4957 -0.3868 3.6292 18.4993

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 557.868140 117.670637 4.741 2.82e-06 ***
sk 0.154281 0.023169 6.659 7.70e-11 ***
comp -0.007245 0.004777 -1.517 0.13006
inc 0.025897 0.009656 2.682 0.00757 **
ratt 0.006918 0.003665 1.887 0.05971 .
year -0.273874 0.058624 -4.672 3.90e-06 ***
oppfum 0.087719 0.047598 1.843 0.06597 .
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.248 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1744, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1639
F-statistic: 16.59 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

do you even link, bro?

I DID link in my post immediately prior on this page, but here it is again: A Last Look at NE's Fumbles

 

[geoff8695]

At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

This is where he runs in to trouble. I'm not sure how you can acknowledge that the Patriots have been a very successful team over this time period, and that fumbling cant come close to accounting for that, and then remark that their success in ball security is indeed oddly (but not unprecedentedly) excellent. I'm sure there are many statistics that the Patriots excel in that you surely cant relate to air pressure in a football. This comes down to causality vs correlation. If, say, the Patriots are one of the top teams in least pre-snap penalties over that period... is it because the ball is under-inflated? There's your problem. You should expect the Pats to fumble less, based on their being a successful team.

He isn't trying to prove that NE's success is due to not fumbling - he is simply looking at the numbers and seeing where they shake out without manipulating away other teams that have also been good at not fumbling.

The numbers clearly show that since the rules change after 2006 (allowing teams to prep/inflate their own footballs) NE has been better at not fumbling and that you can take this however you wish.

If you want to believe that NE didn't cheat you can say that it's because they are a great team that places an emphasis on not turning the ball over, OR if you want to believe that they Brady and Co. are gaining a competitive advantage by deflating footballs then you can see that since the rules change they are awesome at not fumbling the football.

Either way they have been found guilty by the NFL of deflating balls after the refs inspected them AND Tom Brady is believed to have been caught lying about that practice.

I personally don't care. The Patriots are a great organization with indisputable on the field success. However, I'm not going to make excuses for their bad behavior just because I'm a fan of the team/Tom Brady. That's a bridge too far for me, but to each their own...

 

[12punch]

If it did not give Tom an advantage, then why would the team risk doing this repeatedly? This wasn't them submitting under-inflated balls and then say ah shucks if the refs caught it. It was the team altering the balls after they were inspected. That's cheating.

The texts point to a long-standing issue with the Patriots deflating the balls after the referees inspected them. I think the corked bat analogy is perfect. Brady was using performance enhancing equipment. Equipment below acceptable tolerances to fit his smallish hands. This also aided him, the RBs and pass catchers in bad weather where gripping a below standard football is an advantage. The fumble stats bear that out.

'The team' didnt do anything, if you believe the report. Brady and his two stooges, as far as we know, were the only ones involved.The fumble study was debunked. Repeatedly.

I'm sure it's been posted before but do you have any issues with this article, A Last Look at NEs Fumbles?

Doesn't sound to me like it's been debunked - but it does sound like you can choose to view this issue through rose colored glasses if you so desire...

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Also from your link:

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?"

Indeed. Moreover, NE is a good football team, in respects undeniable and not attributable to football inflation. There is a Wyatt Earp fallacy at work here. You should EXPECT the best team of the last decade to have unusual positive statistics compared to less successful teams.

Well that was taken from the portion of the article that stated "READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT" so let's put it in proper context then shall we?

Here's the entirety so neither of us can be accused of selective editing:

The recent debunking and de-debunking of the Patriots' fumble numbers has taken a decidedly unscientific turn. The posts I've read seem to be "advocacy" research, not unlike research sponsored by Nabisco claiming that Oreos are good for you. Each side's biases and contortions aren't very hard to detect. I think that the possibility that the fumble rates may be connected to the current allegations warrants some fair-minded investigation. Some of the debunking has merit, but some of it does not. Whether NE appears to be a 4-sigma outlier or an 8-sigma outlier is beside the point. Without knowing who to trust, I thought I'd go a step further with my own look into the numbers.Instead of slicing the data this way and that--by year, by dome/outdoor, home/away, elite-QB teams and non-elite QB teams, or whatever--let's allow the numbers to speak for themselves. We won't exclude certain teams or years. We'll design a simple model that can account for all of these factors. It seems to me that the debate boils down to two primary considerations: Should dome teams be compared with outdoor teams? And, does the fact that the NE offense is normally very good anyway account for their level of ball security?

I ran a linear regression to predict how many fumbles we should expect of an offense. The predicted number of fumbles isn't really what we're after. It's the error of the model. If one team or another is consistently defying the odds with superior ball security even after accounting for the variables that are likely to explain low fumble rates, that might revise our suspicion that NE has enjoyed some kind of advantage. Some of you more sophisticated readers might pooh-pooh linear regression, but it does have its uses, and I think this is a good one.

The model predicts the total number of offensive (special teams is excluded) fumbles based on each team's completions, incompletions, sacks, and run attempts. Each of these play types have uniquely different probabilities of fumbling, so teams with high numbers of some and low numbers of other play types should be expected to have their fumble numbers vary accordingly. These variables are intended to account for the nature and quality of each offense and its players. This also means that fumble "rate" is implicitly accounted for. In other words, more plays would naturally mean more chances to fumble.

Additionally, the model accounts for a team's home stadium type (indoor or outdoor). Instead of including or excluding certain teams, the regression will give us a fair estimate of how much playing in a dome helps a team's fumble rates. I also included year in the model because fumble rates have been declining league-wide since 2000. Without accounting for this trend, it would appear that all recent teams are fumbling less than expected.

I also created an alternate specification of the model. I thought that the indoor/outdoor dummy variable might be too blunt and not really capture the actual playing conditions based on climate or even field turf type. Some environments make fumbling much more likely than others, such as wet, muddy or extremely cold conditions. Instead of indoor/outdoor, I used a variable for each team's opponent's number of fumbles. (Just fumbles from the games in which they played each other, not season-long totals for every opponent.) The idea is that opponent fumbles are a fair way of gauging each game environment's "fumblerificness." For any one game there's a lot of randomness, but in aggregate it might be a clever way of looking at things.

Here are the results for the first specification (indoor/outdoor). Each cell tells us how many more or fewer fumbles a team actually had compared to how many we would expect. Teams with much fewer fumbles than expected are in green and those with much more than expected are in red. I have deliberately not sorted the table or emphasized NE in any way.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected

Here are the results using opponent fumbles as a control for game environment. Not much difference. In fact, when I switch windows back and forth on each table, the color codes barely change.

Offensive Fumbles Above Expected (Opponent Fumble Spec.)

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE NE IS INNOCENT

NE is not an outlier in any sense. They are actually #2 on the list after ATL for the period since 2006. There are other teams with nearly as impressive over-performance as NE for several-year stretches, such as ATL, IND, and DET. Should we also be investigating ATL for ball tampering?

You can see that the model used may not completely account for QB "eliteness." Brady's best years came since 2007, and you can see the Manning-led Colts had impressive fumble over-performance for a certain period. Drew Brees' Saints seem to have a similar pattern.

NE actually had 3 more fumbles than we'd expect in 2013, breaking the string of consecutive seasons with fewer than expected fumbles.

The results show that indoor/outdoor considerations aren't that important. It's improper to throw out all the dome teams.

Bill Belichick is known to be very focused on ball security. He is very conscious of ball conditions during practice and deliberately makes his players practice with balls in poor condition. He quickly benches players who fumble, and even cuts or releases them. We should expect NE to have good fumble numbers.

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BELIEVE THERE'S SOMETHING FISHY GOING ON

NE is #2 since '06, but is #1 since '07, #1 since '08, #1 since '09...you get the picture. The string of consecutive seasons of over-performance is unmistakable. One year where they might be nipped by randomness (and just barely) does not mean they don't have an advantage.

Besides, the standard here isn't that unless NE is an extreme outlier they are in the clear. It's misleading to imply otherwise. The standard should be: which explanation is the data most consistent with? The tables above show that the data is exactly what we'd expect if a team had an advantage but extremely unusual and unlikely to be observed by chance alone.

Regarding ATL, yes, they are also very good with ball security. Should they be investigated too? Possibly, but I wouldn't start an investigation or make an accusation on statistics alone. The bottom line is that nothing here rules out the possibility other teams also tamper with their footballs.

The timing of the sudden improvement is suspicious. Just a year into the new rules, NE goes from being average overall and having just about the number of fumbles we would expect given their offensive style to being the absolute best in the league.

NE's over-performance cannot be explained by Brady's skills or his "eliteness." Brady was the same person before and after the rule change, but his team's fumble numbers didn't change until after. Further, when certifiably non-elite Matt Cassel had the reigns in '08, NE had equally impressive over-performance as any other year in the post-rule-change period. Those considerations plus the fact that the model accounts for run-pass balance, completion percentage and sacks disproves the "Brady is just that good" argument.

PS Ever notice that Brady underperformed his usual self in the two Super Bowls since the rule change? What's different about those games? The league provides all the balls.

WHAT DO I THINK?

First, I believe we should have very strong evidence before making accusations about cheating or ethical violations whether we're talking about football or any other endeavor. Statistics alone could never be expected to provide that level of evidence.

Regarding the two main questions of the analysis, I'm split. I agree that throwing out all the indoor teams appears to be premature. Indoor teams do fumble less frequently but not by enough to throw them out of the comparison entirely. The model says indoor teams have under 1 fumble per year less than others, accounting for the other predictors. That's not enough to explain why ATL and NO also fumble relatively infrequently.

On the other hand, I think this model shows that the basic nature and quality of the NE offense doesn't fully explain their over-performance. But that is tempered by the fact that there are certainly other factors the model doesn't capture.

I admit I'm also sympathetic to what I'd call the maximum likelihood explanation. Which alternative explanation is the evidence most consistent with? For those of you statisticians out there, think of it as Bayesian parameter fitting. The parameter is the range of possible explanations, i.e. "the truth:" (NE tampered, NE did not tamper). Which of these theories does the data best fit? But it's not completely clear to me which way things lean. I guess it depends on how cynical you are.

To be honest, I'm not as interested in the statistical issue at hand as I am in the epistemological considerations surrounding it. There's a difference between wondering how often any NFL team might be so fortunate with fumbles, and wondering how likely NE itself might be so fortunate in a certain period of time. It's not like we're scanning the stats of all 32 teams to find unusual patterns over any period and then making accusations of improper behavior. In this case, the accusations already exist based on non-statistical evidence and we're scanning NE's stats in a certain period to see if they're consistent or inconsistent with the accusations. Those are very different questions, and given the same data, yield very different answers.At the furthest, we could say the numbers are consistent with the theory there was tampering, and stop there. NE isn't some crazy outlier, but they are the best in the league at ball security since shortly after the rule change, which would be what we'd expect if the accusations were true. The numbers do not prove it by any stretch, and the alternative theory that the numbers are explained by other factors remains plausible.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS ANYWAY?

Let's say that NE had exactly the number of fumbles over the last few seasons that we'd expect given their offensive parameters. How big of a difference would this mean to the bottom line of winning games? Fumbles (not fumbles lost) average -0.055 Win Probability Added (WPA). In other words, each fumble reduces a team's chances of winning a game by about 5 or 6 percentage points. NE has averaged 5 fewer fumbles than expected in each season since '07. That means that their over-performance results in about 0.28 WPA per season. Every little bit matters, but that's not enough to make a big dent in NE's outstanding record over that period. Then again, this only considers fumbles, and not other possible benefits of under-inflation, such as throwing and catching.

Note:

1. Regression results pasted below.

2. I also ran specifications where year was a set of dummy (0/1) variables. This did not change the results meaningfully, so I kept the simpler version with year as a linear predictor.

Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + indoor, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-17.1969 -3.4299 -0.3501 3.6088 18.3044

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 596.262989 116.293152 5.127 4.30e-07 ***
sk 0.154891 0.023258 6.660 7.67e-11 ***
comp -0.005998 0.004910 -1.222 0.22240
inc 0.027522 0.009647 2.853 0.00452 **
ratt 0.007952 0.003660 2.173 0.03028 *
year -0.292761 0.057957 -5.051 6.29e-07 ***
indoor1 -0.283076 0.586677 -0.483 0.62967
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.266 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1689, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1583
F-statistic: 15.95 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Call:
lm(formula = ofum ~ sk + comp + inc + ratt + year + oppfum, data = data)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-16.7713 -3.4957 -0.3868 3.6292 18.4993

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 557.868140 117.670637 4.741 2.82e-06 ***
sk 0.154281 0.023169 6.659 7.70e-11 ***
comp -0.007245 0.004777 -1.517 0.13006
inc 0.025897 0.009656 2.682 0.00757 **
ratt 0.006918 0.003665 1.887 0.05971 .
year -0.273874 0.058624 -4.672 3.90e-06 ***
oppfum 0.087719 0.047598 1.843 0.06597 .
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 5.248 on 471 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1744, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1639
F-statistic: 16.59 on 6 and 471 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

do you even link, bro?

I DID link in my post immediately prior on this page, but here it is again: A Last Look at NE's Fumbles

I mean link instead of appropriating the entire ####### article

they should suspend you 8 games for poor netiquette

 

[Dinsy Ejotuz]

Reading the "Wyatt Earp" goofballery from people who presumably know better was a real bummer when that study first came out. What we learned was that a lot of the bigger names in FF stat nerdery were willing to not find what they wanted to not find.

There may have been some technical problems with what the guy did, but he didn't go data dredging and report his one interesting finding. He had a hypothesis about a specific team and a specific outcome, and his research supported it. Wyatt Earp had nothing to do with it.

 

[mbuehner]

Reading the "Wyatt Earp" goofballery from people who presumably know better was a real bummer when that study first came out. What we learned was that a lot of the bigger names in FF stat nerdery were willing to not find what they wanted to not find.

There may have been some technical problems with what the guy did, but he didn't go data dredging and report his one interesting finding. He had a hypothesis about a specific team and a specific outcome, and his research supported it. Wyatt Earp had nothing to do with it.

No, he used the data that supported his conjecture and excluded the data that contradicted it. Which is pretty much a felony in statistical analysis.

 

[12punch]

Reading the "Wyatt Earp" goofballery from people who presumably know better was a real bummer when that study first came out. What we learned was that a lot of the bigger names in FF stat nerdery were willing to not find what they wanted to not find.

There may have been some technical problems with what the guy did, but he didn't go data dredging and report his one interesting finding. He had a hypothesis about a specific team and a specific outcome, and his research supported it. Wyatt Earp had nothing to do with it.

I think the one guy who bothered to put the time into debunking this nonsense did a good enough job, but just as an aside ---- a a ron started getting regular starting reps in 2008.

excluding dome teams, over that period of time 2008-2014 green bay has been one of the better teams in beating the expected fumbles.

probably top 5, certainly not bottom 5

fyi

edit in the 7 years a a ron's been sneaking in balloons green bay is 10 better than expected.

in the 7 years prior to a a ron and his balloon balls they were 30 worse than expected

 

[Bucky86]

If only the 31 other teams in the NFL just more emphasis in not fumbling.

 

[12punch]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

 

[BigSteelThrill]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

pardon?

 

[David Dodds]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

If only more baseball players did more things like McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa, they too would hit more home runs. It goes both ways. Some people would rather try and win honestly while others will cheat to gain that advantage.

 

[Anarchy99]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

If only more baseball players did more things like McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa, they too would hit more home runs. It goes both ways. Some people would rather try and win honestly while others will cheat to gain that advantage.

George Brett put too much pine tar on his bat and above the height allowed. Cheater?

 

[mbuehner]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

If only more baseball players did more things like McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa, they too would hit more home runs. It goes both ways. Some people would rather try and win honestly while others will cheat to gain that advantage.

George Brett put too much pine tar on his bat and above the height allowed. Cheater?

Change the record books.

 

[BigSteelThrill]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

If only more baseball players did more things like McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa, they too would hit more home runs. It goes both ways. Some people would rather try and win honestly while others will cheat to gain that advantage.

George Brett put too much pine tar on his bat and above the height allowed. Cheater?

To a very small degree.

 

[moleculo]

Correction -- the report specifically said that "the team" was not at fault. Two employees were at fault, and one players was "generally aware" of it. That's it.

Generally speaking, who do team employees work for?

 

[cstu]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

You know who really knew how to win? That guy from The Last Boyscout.

 

[Run It Up]

If only the 31 other teams in the NFL just more emphasis in not fumbling.

Besides Coughlin, I don't think any coach/team in the league comes even close to how much the Patriots emphasize ball security.

 

[BigSteelThrill]

true, because other teams aren't as willing to cheat to obtain that ball security as the Pats*.

 

[Run It Up]

true, because other teams aren't as willing to cheat to obtain that ball security as the Pats*.

Because other teams in the league are afraid of benching their starting RB.

Coughlin and Belichick have an almost zero tolerance for that ####. You put the ball on the ground, you are now the #2.

 

[Tango]

Not only did Brady cheat he lied about it, which is worse than cheating.

I am sure if he came out and admitted to deflating footballs all of this nonsense would go away

Brady could have picked the Giambi route. Instead he chose the Arod route.

Unitas is correct. The same crime is viewed completely differently when you lie you ### off about it in front of the whole world

 

[12punch]

if only the other 31 teams did a lot of things like the pats maybe they'd be competitive with the pats

If only more baseball players did more things like McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa, they too would hit more home runs. It goes both ways. Some people would rather try and win honestly while others will cheat to gain that advantage.

I'm not surprised at all that a handful of internet no-lifers spend their time trolling pats fans about this kind of thing, but I'd really be amazed if a guy who supposedly makes his living off of football was to think the patriots success was due to sucking a pound of air out of a ball.

that would be pretty much beyond belief.

and I guess as an added thought, as I was about to post this, I'd be equally amazed if a guy who was making this living off observing the nfl was to claim ignorance of the laundry list of transgressions by other teams.

again, these things would be probably and most likely untrue, and conflict with my established beliefs about a professional football viewer.

the only other possibility would be some more sinister motivation --- like self righteous prosthelytizing, or possibly thinly veiled axe grinding.

in your particular case I'm dismissing simple internet trolling, but who really knows.

 

[Tango]

There really needs to be a book deal in the works for the deflators/memorabilia dealers the P*ts were employing.

I mean, why wouldn't they?

I've thought about this too, and it's basically the only reason I can come up with for thinking that maybe Brady is telling the truth or has somehow convinced himself that he's not culpable.

McNally and the other guy are never going to be employed in the NFL ever again. Their careers are over. But they're going to have 15 minutes in which to cash in with exclusive interviews and the like. They'd be fools not to do so, and Brady and his agent surely realize that. If you're Brady, and you know that McNally is about to spill the beans to ESPN, would you really dig in like he's currently doing?

Obviously I think Brady is guilty as charged, and he's doing a Roger Clemons. This one little nugget still seems a little weird is all.

Regarding McNally and Jastremski. Brady threw them under the bus. They're the same as every other equipment people who were vastly more likely to lose their jobs if they didn't make Brady happy than because they're not following the letter of the law.

Better late than never for Brady to raise his hand and admit that his preferences for the balls, whether lacking detail or not in how he described it, was the cause of equipment guys to go too far in trying to make them happy...and therefore he (Brady) takes full responsibility if any rules were broken.

This tact has big downsides and will get little sympathy this late in ten game, but its still the best way for Brady to restore his leadership credentials and also treat some low level employees with the respect they deserve for simply trying to make their boss happy (despite snide texts here and there).

 

[12punch]

despite earlier reports they're both pats employees, right?

I can't really keep track of all these reports of who was doing what but it sounded like one guy is being accused, while the other is simply implicated as an accomplice --- so, I'd have to wonder if they'd both really be fired.

the nfl can probably ban the deflator guy from handling balls, but kraft could find another job for him, or they could just inspect the balls more carefully and hold the team responsible.

is it really a given they're both fired at this point?

 

[BigSteelThrill]

true, because other teams aren't as willing to cheat to obtain that ball security as the Pats*.

Because other teams in the league are afraid of benching their starting RB.

Coughlin and Belichick have an almost zero tolerance for that ####. You put the ball on the ground, you are now the #2.

And cheat. Thats a Pats* thing that must be included into any such statements.

 

[12punch]

I'm sure you'll keep us posted on all the cheating that was going on after garoppolo beats your asses week 1.

dust off that inspector gadget kit

 

[Run It Up]

I'm sure you'll keep us posted on all the cheating that was going on after garoppolo beats your asses week 1.

dust off that inspector gadget kit

They sow the wind - Goatropollo will spare no one.

 

[BigSteelThrill]

I like where you guys had to go with it to try and feel good.

I can handle a loss, they happen.

But everyone knows you guys are hurting... Pats fans defensive/offensive repsones.

 

[12punch]

yeah, if only I could trade the pats for the steelers, right now ---- if only........

being a pats fan is like a curse

 

[12punch]

btw, not that this is the place for it, but I saw a reference to a particular passage that was pretty entertaining, in case any of you pats fans missed it.

the latest gem:

Although Anderson's best recollection is that he used the Logo Gauge,
he said that it is certainly possible that he used the Non Logo Gauge

We credit Anderson‟s recollection of the pre-game measurements taken on the dayof the AFC Championship Game based on both the level of confidence Anderson expressed in his recollection and the consistency of his recollection with information
provided by each of the Patriot s and Colts regarding their target inflation levels
.
As noted above, we also believe that Walt Anderson most likely used the Non Logo Gauge prior to the game

 

[Courtjester]

I think the real fun comes when the two ball guys get hit worse than Brady as far as punishment. Brady can withstand losing a game or two's check. These guys will financially die from this report. Enter (insert network name) offering big money for a tell all and then all hell breaks loose.

 

[12punch]

I have no idea about the one guy, but the deflator guy sounds like he might work 8 hrs/month for 3 months out of the year.

I would have absolutely no idea about this, though, obviously.

generally your full-time job would be making you the money --- not this kind of part-time thing on the side.

the guy who might be full-time sounds like he's being painted more as an accessory.

anyway, these guys have been with the team for 20 yrs -- I doubt either will be in the soup line next week.

 

[Courtjester]

I have no idea about the one guy, but the deflator guy sounds like he might work 8 hrs/month for 3 months out of the year.

I would have absolutely no idea about this, though, obviously.

generally your full-time job would be making you the money --- not this kind of part-time thing on the side.

the guy who might be full-time sounds like he's being painted more as an accessory.

anyway, these guys have been with the team for 20 yrs -- I doubt either will be in the soup line next week.

I think you are probably right, but at what point does the amount of money a reporter throws at them for a tell all, makes them think?

I could be wrong, but I doubt either are millionaires.

 

[T J]

Do you not remember Brady lying about his level of contact/involvement with these guys, pretending to not even know who handles the footballs despite repeatedly calling/texting McNally directly on one of said Patriots owned cell phones? Pretty strange to have a guy you don't even know on speed dial like that don't ya think?

well, seeing as how brady wisely hasn't given up his phone I'm not sure how you'd know if the guy was on speed dial or if brady had to call the other guy to get his number.

pretty strange to make an assumption like that, ya think, buddy?

guy...?

I'll admit I didn't read the 240 pages of nonsense, so I didn't see all those texts back and forth between brady and wtfever you're referring to over the past 5 years

Wisely?

I think the word you're looking for is cowardly.......buddy.......guy.

 

[Jercules]

yourteamcheats.com

For those of you interested in a little context.

 

[12punch]

Ex-Ravens and retired Pro Bowl quarterback Jeff Blake confessed in an interview that removing air from footballs was common when he played in the NFL from 1992-2005.

"I'm just going to let the cat of the bag, every team does it, every game, it has been since I played," the ex-Ravens QB said Wednesday in a radio interview on the "Midday 180" show on Nashville's 104.5 The Zone. "Cause when you take the balls out of the bag, they are rock hard. And you can't feel the ball as well. It's too hard.

"Everybody puts the pin in and takes just enough air out of the ball that you can feel it a little better. But it's not the point to where it's flat. So I don't know what the big deal is. It's not something that's not been done for 20 years."

Blake says that he'd order ball boys to let air out of his footballs just before the start of games during his entire NFL career, which included time with the Baltimore Ravens in 2002.

 

[MG345]

That was before the current rule was in place, literally has no bearing on the Pats cheating.

 

[The General]

yourteamcheats.com

For those of you interested in a little context.

Sweet link.

 

[Uruk-Hai]

Question for Pats fans: do you guys feel that the Pats are the target of unfair witch hunts by the NFL? Not by the media or other NFL fans, but the NFL administration itself.

I ask for a couple of reasons.

I',m a Ravens fan. I don't know if there's another fan base - especially one as small as Baltimore's - that dreams up so many conspiracy theories about how "we are getting ####ed by the league; they just want the Pats & Steelers to win". From the schedule to fines, it's amazing what they come up with (it's also pretty amusing).

I'm also getting a martyr vibe from several posters in this thread, which amuses me even more.

As a Bronco fan, I can say that we feel the same as you - we harbor a ton of conspiracies as well, including East coast Bias, the media-driven love of everything New England including demi-god worship of Brady (and, oddly Ray Lewis to tie it into Baltimore).I agree that its amusing seeing a team do blessed by the NFL powers claim persecution.

I think the craziest - out of many, many crazy theories I've seen by Ravens fans - was when Baltimore lost a game to the Titans. This was when McNair was the Baltimore QB. There was a garbage PF call against Suggs on Kerry Collins that turned the game. Anyway, the call or the game doesn't matter nearly as much as how it got spun into a conspiracy by some Ravens fans.

As best I can recall, the theory went something like this:

The NFL wanted to punish former Golden Boy Steve McNair for going to an "evil" team like the Ravens. Because Baltimore stole the Browns. And because, even though the theory held that McNair had been a golden boy, they were punishing a black QB. There was no irony in this theory. And all of this from Artie in Arbutus, who wouldn't spit on a black dude if he was on fire.

To pan wider, I guess all fan bases have their nutballs. This thread confirms it. The contortions some are going through here would make an Olympic gymnast weep in envy.

 

[GoBirds]

I see we've moved through "nothing happened" and "it's no big deal" into the "everybody does it" stage.

I can't really place that on Elizabeth Kubler Ross's spectrum. Are we closer to "grief"and "acceptance"?

That depends. Have you accepted that the Patriots won 4 SBs, Brady and Belichick will be in the HoF regardless, and that Deflategate will never result in any asterisks in the official NFL record books?

*

It's been 7-8 years since Spygate, and I still don't see any * in the NFL record books for the first 3 Patriots SBs. Keep trying though, maybe it'll happen soon!

**

 

[Tool]

That was before the current rule was in place, literally has no bearing on the Pats cheating.

When was the current rule put into place?