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The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

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Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#31

Post by ellyagg »

jsyedidia wrote: post #4

If you watch Patriots games, you'll see that if Patriots running backs fumble, they get benched. If they do it again they get released. Belichick is maniacal about getting on his players about fumbling. That is a simple explanation. The team has been well-coached for a long time. If you think the Patriots' success is all from deflated balls, you need to explain how they out-scored the Colts 28-0 in the second half (a…

No one is claiming the Patriots aren't good. They are claiming that, with extremely good evidence at this point, they also cheated.

There are other teams that try really hard to train their players not to fumble, including taking them out until they learn not to fumble. Belichick has been otherworldly good at this training.

The Patriots were not always otherworldly at not fumbling. In fact, this acumen started the same year the NFL changed the rules so that the team was allowed to have full control of the balls after pregame inspection.

This isn't a minor issue. Turnovers are hugely predictive of game outcomes.

The Patriots were caught with deflated footballs. They had deflated footballs for a reason.

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#32

Post by Bulkington »

robryan wrote: post #8

As someone who doesn't follow the NFL I am surprised that they allow the teams to supply their own balls. Seems it would be less complicated and achieve an even playing field if everyone had to use the same balls supplied by the league. Does this happen in baseball/ basketball as well? From an Australian perspective it seems unusual.

In baseball, cheating is a worthwhile art and a science.

http://a.espncdn.com/mlb/columns/neyer_rob/1380568.html

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#33

Post by [deleted] »

ellyagg wrote: post #31
jsyedidia wrote: post #4

If you watch Patriots games, you'll see that if Patriots running backs fumble, they get benched. If they do it again they get released. Belichick is maniacal about getting on his players about fumbling. That is a simple explanation. The team has been well-coached for a long time. If you think the Patriots' success is all from deflated balls, you need to explain how they out-scored the Colts 28-0 in the second half (a…

No one is claiming the Patriots aren't good. They are claiming that, with extremely good evidence at this point, they also cheated. There are other teams that try really hard to train their players not to fumble, including taking them out until they learn not to fumble. Belichick has been otherworldly good at this training. The Patriots were not always otherworldly at not fumbling. In fact, this acumen started the sa…

[deleted]

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#34

Post by stchang »

Anechoic wrote: post #22

For those of you who aren't keeping up with the up to the minute minutae of the New England Patriots (American football team) scandal (presumably because you have lives), head coach Bill Belichick gave a press conference a few hours ago where he provided a hypothesis of what might have happened: as many people know, quarterbacks like their game footballs prepared in specific (sometimes elaborate [0]) ways prior to us…

> (presumably because you have lives)

Why does it matter what people do for leisure?

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#35

Post by jonjenk »

Anechoic wrote: post #16
jonjenk wrote: post #2

Analyzing outlying statistics across all the available variables would be an interesting technique to try to predict other potential rules violations. This could apply to many different types of sporting events. I wonder if anyone is working on this problem? Despite a few nit picky issues I have with this particular analysis of the Patriots fumble data it's probably the strongest evidence I've seen so far that there…

it's probably the strongest evidence I've seen so far that there has likely been a persistent rules violation. That's only true if ball inflation tracks with fumbles. There have been lots of assertions that's the case, but I haven't seen any evidence. Two counter examples: - If you look at AFCC, that's Patriots had 1 fumble in the first half playing with an underinflated ball in dry weather conditions, and had zero f…

I agree that we don't have a controlled study in this case. However, it will be interesting to look at this data at the end of next season. If the Patriots fumble stats revert to pre 2007 levels it will certainly raise some interesting questions.

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#36

Post by tbrake »

jsyedidia wrote: post #19
fecak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past two seasons there have been 9 total fumbles by Patriot running backs - only 1 all this year. All of those backs are still employed by the Patriots. Over those two seasons, the majority of fumbles came from Brady and Edelman. Of the backs that fumbled in 2012, only Woodhead is gone. He fumbled only once. Two backs fumbled in 2011, once each. Woodhead (who is gone) and Ridley, who is still a Patriot. Patr…

"Patriots backs simply don't fumble": Yes, because if they have a fumbling problem, they stop playing until they fix it (Ridley) or they cease being Patriots if they can't fix it (Maroney). Belichick is well-known for having a "doghouse" for running backs who fumble. "Your explanation isn't supported by the data": I wasn't trying to give an explanation supported by the data. I was trying to give an explanation for th…

I think it would be pretty easy to show, similar to this article -

Pre-computer era elite GMs and computer-era elite GMs have similar error rates[1], with the caveat that we presume disagreeing with the computer's top choice to be an error. They mostly agreed with the computer's assessment something like 50-57% of the time.

As far as I know Magnus' games haven't been subjected to this kind of analysis, and I recall 2 pretty bad moves in the recent match with Anand, so I'd be interested to see it. I suspect he may be even slightly above 60%.

Should it be something like high 70%'s though I think it would be time to start a conversation about it. It's how Ivanov was busted: overwhelmingly playing one of the top 2 engine moves, which is basically impossible. [2]

1 - http://en.chessbase.com/post/computers-choose-who-was-the-st...

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr0J8SPENjM

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#37

Post by asynchronous13 »

I'm becoming more disappointed in this analysis.

"But in 2007, something happened to propel [the Patriots] to a much better rate."

The author is using a 5-year average, and then concluding that something must have happened in a single year that is suddenly different. What that implies to me, is that they had a particularly terrible year in 2002. So, when the really bad year slides off of the 5-year moving average, then the 5-year average suddenly looks much better.

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#38

Post by jsyedidia »

ellyagg wrote: post #31
jsyedidia wrote: post #4

If you watch Patriots games, you'll see that if Patriots running backs fumble, they get benched. If they do it again they get released. Belichick is maniacal about getting on his players about fumbling. That is a simple explanation. The team has been well-coached for a long time. If you think the Patriots' success is all from deflated balls, you need to explain how they out-scored the Colts 28-0 in the second half (a…

No one is claiming the Patriots aren't good. They are claiming that, with extremely good evidence at this point, they also cheated. There are other teams that try really hard to train their players not to fumble, including taking them out until they learn not to fumble. Belichick has been otherworldly good at this training. The Patriots were not always otherworldly at not fumbling. In fact, this acumen started the sa…

"They had the deflated footballs for a reason.": It's called the ideal gas law. http://nesn.com/2015/01/boston-college-professor-weather-had... If you're concerned that the chairman of BC's physics department didn't do his calculations correctly, I also have a Ph.D. in physics and corroborated them. Make sure you use both absolute pressure and absolute temperature if you want to do the computations yourself; it's really quite simple.

By the way, about why the Colts balls didn't deflate: the BC professor says they may have over-inflated them, but I think a simpler explanation is that if the Colts prepared their balls outdoors and they equilibrated to outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs, you would not expect them to deflate. Watch Belichick's press conference today, with an understanding of the ideal gas law, and the fact that working in a ball will also increase the temperature of the gas inside it, and it becomes obvious that if they followed the legal procedure Belichick claimed they followed, the Patriots did not cheat, unless you think having your footballs obey the ideal gas law is cheating.

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#39

Post by axiak »

zaroth wrote: post #24
Anechoic wrote: post #22

For those of you who aren't keeping up with the up to the minute minutae of the New England Patriots (American football team) scandal (presumably because you have lives), head coach Bill Belichick gave a press conference a few hours ago where he provided a hypothesis of what might have happened: as many people know, quarterbacks like their game footballs prepared in specific (sometimes elaborate [0]) ways prior to us…

Going from 75 degrees to 50 produces something like a 1.5 psi reduction. 85 -> 35 wound be closer to a 2psi drop. Water vapor increases the drop. Funny thing is searching for the calculation produces highly variable results.

Belichick specifically said he was not talking about atmospheric temperature conditions, but the conditions of the ball. Presumably whatever rubbing of the ball was necessary for preparation heated the air in the ball. He must have explained this in the most obtuse way possible to reduce the chance people call him a cheater for heating the air in the ball.

Re: The New England Patriots’ prevention of fumbles is nearly impossible

#40

Post by Anechoic »

stchang wrote: post #34
Anechoic wrote: post #22

For those of you who aren't keeping up with the up to the minute minutae of the New England Patriots (American football team) scandal (presumably because you have lives), head coach Bill Belichick gave a press conference a few hours ago where he provided a hypothesis of what might have happened: as many people know, quarterbacks like their game footballs prepared in specific (sometimes elaborate [0]) ways prior to us…

> (presumably because you have lives) Why does it matter what people do for leisure?

I was being self deprecating - you can see from my other post in this thread and from my gameday Twitter posts ([0] for example) that I'm an NFL/Patriots fan.

[0] https://twitter.com/Anechoic/status/558381309115244545

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