Deflategate Update

[The Cobra]

Per Jay Glazer of Fox Sports, the person responsible for DeflateGate is none other than Bill—-nope, just kidding, it’s a locker room attendant. According to Glazer’s sources, the attendant took the official game balls to “another area” before going to the field.

Breaking news: sources tell @FOXSports the NFL has zeroed in on a locker room attendant w Patriots who allegedly took balls from officials locker room to another area on way to field. Sources say they have interviewed him and additionally have video. Still gauging if any wrong doing occurred with him but he is strong person of interest.

Both Bill Belichick and Tom Brady flat out denied any knowledge of DeflateGate and even offered up alternate theories as to what happened. Additionally, both said they never instructed anyone to tamper with the balls.
So apparently this locker attendant went rogue. At least that’s what the Pats want you to believe. Stay tuned…


Cobra...
Goes to show there`s always going to be a fall guy.................no matter how much they have to pay him.

[TLG]

Ray Rice knocked his girlfriend out cold , Adrian Peterson beat his kid with a switch
Ray McDonald and Chris Cook of the San Francsico 49ers, Tony McDaniel and
Kevin Williams of the Seattle Seahawks, Brandon Marshall and Santonio Holmes of
the Chicago Bears, Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers, Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys,
Erik Walden of the Indianapolis Colts, Donte Whitner of the Cleveland Browns,
Randy Starks of the Miami Dolphins and Frostee Rucker of the Arizona Cardinals
have all been arrested for domestic violence or related charges ,,,

The NFL, with a 2lb,, Piece of chit story has managed to divert attention from headlines
that were smearing it's image ,,,, BRILLIANT !!

Never underestimated the multi billion dollar think tank and the minds that power it forward ,,,

Some rogue ball boy?? ,,, BALLS !!! LOL

[kenkell1]

don't matter one bit. The Seahawks will be cleaning house on Sunday and Brady can take a hike.

[The Cobra]

don't matter one bit. The Seahawks will be cleaning house on Sunday and Brady can take a hike.

i like your thinking young man...........

[TLG]

the best team, on the field ,, on that day ,, will win the game

[The Cobra]

the best team, on the field ,, on that day ,, will win the game

coward!!!!

[TLG]

ha!!

go pats go !!!!!



new-england-patriots-sexy-superfans-8.jpg

[hutch]

C/P...Maybe the smoking gun isn’t in a bathroom at Gillette Stadium. Maybe it’s in the laptop of a civil engineer in Washington, D.C.

One of the strangest twists in the already strange saga of deflate-gate is the sudden star turn of a man who runs a gambling website when he’s not doing his day job. Warren Sharp is a 36-year-old dad who loves numbers and algorithms, and decided to apply some statistics to the Patriots when he heard about the football deflation investigation. What he found sent ripples through the sports world and got a few other statisticians pretty upset.

It also may have implications beyond Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.

Sharp’s idea was to look at fumbles. That led him to a more refined topic: how well the Patriots held onto the ball both before and after the 2006 season, which happened to be the year Brady and Peyton Manning pushed for a rule change which allowed each team to provide their own footballs for games.

“Something significant changed from 2006 to 2007 that allowed them to retain the football,” Sharp said by phone Tuesday, “and that continues today.”

According to Sharp’s calculations, the Patriots’ fumble rate was 42 touches per fumble from 2000 through 2006. That was about the league average. Since 2007, however, that rate has dropped dramatically, to 74 touches per fumble. Over that time, the Pats are the best team in the NFL at holding onto the ball, even including dome teams.

“Based upon the data we’ve collected and the probabilities, it definitely is extremely unlikely that their ability to hold onto the football would change so much and be as far away from the rest of the NFL,” Sharp said. “It’s extremely unlikely.”


We all know correlation does not mean causation, but this is one whopper of a correlation. The Patriots were basically an average team in terms of fumbling the football, and then Brady pushed for a rule change, and then the Patriots suddenly become wizards at football control. And all this would be cool or quirky if we weren’t embroiled in a nationwide debate over whether the Patriots altered the footballs they bring to games.

This finding trickles down to individual players, in some cases. Kevin Faulk was drafted by the Patriots in 1999 and played in New England through 2011. Up until the 2007 season, Faulk had 23 fumbles. After that point, he had two. Danny Amendola had 10 fumbles in four seasons with the Rams, then came to New England and lost the ball only once in two years.

As for Brady himself, he had 59 fumbles in his first six seasons, and only 37 in his most recent seven seasons.

“Did Bill Belichick teach players anything differently starting that season?” Sharp asked. “Something clearly happened.”

What does all this prove? Well, nothing definitively. Sharp himself admitted there is no ironclad conclusion from his data. Fumbles are somewhat random occurrences. Some fumbles happen on kickoffs, which use different footballs by league rules. And obviously the weather is different in each game. Playing in Miami in the heat of early September is far different from playing in Green Bay in December.

But Sharp is well aware of all that and yet he insists the findings can’t possibly be happenstance.

“This is definitely not random fluctuation,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, more than a few Patriots fans are not buying it. “Statistical hocus pocus,” rants one fan on Facebook. But Sharp’s analysis is also under fire from a couple of other statisticians.

“It’s 98 percent bunk,” said Greg Matthews, an assistant professor of statistics at Loyola University in Chicago. “He basically reached a conclusion already and he wants to find the most sensational stats he can find.”

Matthews said he found a “tremendous amount” of flaws in Sharp’s breakdown, among them the touches-per-fumble method of lining up the Patriots against the rest of the league.

“I refute the fact that the Patriots are an outlier,” Matthews said. “I refute that fact definitely. Are they better after [2006]? Possibly, but it’s not outrageously better.”

Matthews admits he’s a Patriots fan, though he insisted, “This has nothing to do with Patriots.”

His own portrayal of the statistics, however, doesn’t differ all that largely from Sharp’s. Matthews gives the Patriots’ fumbles-per-100-carries from 2007 through 2014 as 0.63, and the next best team is St. Louis (a dome team) with 0.71. The league average is 1.0. That still sets the Pats apart, if not as starkly. It still sets 2006 as a demarcation point.

Another leader in the statistic community, Brian Burke of Advanced Football Analytics, drew this conclusion in a recent post after looking at fumble rates (excluding dome teams):

“Whoa. In this case NE is at the top of the list, and the next best team is a distant second. Notice how the second team [Baltimore] through the second to last team [Philadelphia] have rates that are within 1 or 2 plays of each other. NE, however, is better than the next best team by 20 plays per fumble.”

That’s hard to explain away.

Sharp doesn’t claim any team as his favorite. His affinity is for the numbers, whether for his handicapping site or for his algorithms. He said he would like other people to crunch the numbers even if it shows where he went wrong.

“Can you deny that the Patriots did not change dramatically in fumble rate since the 2006 season?” he asked. “Can you deny that the Pats are significantly better than the rest of the NFL since then?”

If no one can deny those two assertions, the question that raises looms as large as deflate-gate, if not larger. Winning the turnover battle is an enormous part of winning football games, and if the Patriots found a way to win the turnover battle, whether by deflating the ball or some other measure (or both), that indicates a turning point in the sport starting in 2006.

It's important to recognize that the Patriots' ability to hold onto the football isn't just about statistics. It reflects terrific preparation and execution, led by a future Hall of Fame coach and a future Hall of Fame quarterback. But this latest controversy has brought scrutiny to everything Pats-related – even a Brady quote that was innocuous in 2006.

“The thing is, every quarterback likes it a little bit different,” Brady said back then, arguing his case for every team being allowed to provide its own footballs at games. “Some like them blown up a little bit more, some like them a little more thin, some like them a little more new, some like them really broken in.”

Statistics, like footballs, are malleable. But Sharp is confident that although humans can change their story over time, numbers do not.

[hutch]

c/p...Bill Bradley -- Hall of Famer, Rhodes Scholar, NBA champion, Olympic gold medalist and U.S. senator -- was a ball deflater.

To put the New England Patriots' DeflateGate flap in some perspective, consider that one of the most respected sportsman and statesman in U.S. history was known for fiddling with the ball pressure before and sometimes even during a game.

This nugget of information was part of a 1987 radio documentary produced on the WNBC SportsNight program by Budd Mishkin and Gary Bridges about the glory days of the Knicks. It featured an incredible range of interviews including media who covered the team on a daily basis. Here's what three of them had to say about Bradley's obsession with how the basketball was inflated.

Leonard Lewin, New York Post
"Just before every game, they'd give him the game ball, and people used to wonder why. Why would he? He was testing the weight. He was the ball tester. The official ball tester for the Knicks. He'd just squeeze the ball, and he'd know how much pounds of weight was in."

Phil Berger, New York Times, author of "Miracle On 33rd Street: The New York Knickerbockers' Championship Season, 1969-1970"
"He liked a dead ball. That is a kind of ball that would hit the rim and die. He hated the rebounder's ball. Rebounders love a ball that comes flying off because it's way up in the air, and who gets the ball but the guy that can soar for it. Basketball can be all kinds of consistencies within a certain prescribed range, so he would go through the balls and pick out the one that was his ball.

"I remember one playoff game against the Bullets, somebody sneaked in a rebounder's ball, and he went crazy. Screaming at the refs. When he'd scream, the veins in his neck would start popping out. He'd get red in his forehead and face. He was very disturbed that they had sneaked in a live, rabbity ball. He hollered loud enough and long enough, so they brought back that dead ball that he liked."

Marv Albert, Knicks radio play-by-play announcer
"One referee once told me -- and it was during a Knick-Bullet playoff series -- Bradley wasn't satisfied with the way the basketball felt. He felt there was too much air in it, and he complained about it, and they didn't take heed. And then in the second half, he was spotted with one of those little devices that you take air out of the ball and pump air in, and he tried to sneak it out. He tried to let air out of the basketball, so no one would see. This is our U.S. Senator Bill Bradley."

[TLG]

Brady began dating Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen in December 2006

gisele1.jpggisele2.jpggisele3.jpg



while it's true that numbers don't lie ,, it's also true that numbers can
be applied anywhere and anyhow to anything ,,
so to the number scholars, professors and to the number nerds ,,
take another look and keep on crunching ,, LOL