A lot of Magnesium carbonate is great for holding on to a football.
Posted on 01/29/2015 11:01:22 AM PST by Red Badger
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 ...
(Excerpt) Read more at sports.yahoo.com ...
Belicheck benches players for weeks when they fumble. Maybe there’s some motivational aspect.
I posted this finding a few days ago on a deflate thread and nobody noticed.
I bet you were deflated...........
Even his star RB’s?............
It never fails... any comment on this topic gets a quick response, LOL.
And, the Pats don’t really have star RBs, although Blount has looked pretty good at the end of the year once before.
Maybe Eli Manning got one of the Pats deflated balls by accident, so when Tyree pushed it against his helmet...
A lot of Magnesium carbonate is great for holding on to a football.
Since the reason for the requested rule change was how slick the balls were, I would expect most teams got better. It would be interesting to see how the percent improvement compares by team and what those teams do to season the footballs.
Just a statistical coincidence................;^)
Salt, pepper, Sandpaper...........
Magnesium carbonate?............You mean CHALK!...............
Would you like to see the football in soccer decided by the home team, LOL!!!
It’s gonna be tough for Bunco Bill or Tricky Tom to defraud the NFL officials this weekend.
DUH: It is EASIER to hold onto a softer football.
Well, in Soccer, an overinflated football would be more ‘active’....................
This Dad-nerd should run his numbers on the Green Bay Packers...before Lombardi and after Lombardi arrived there. He was not a happy guy about balls on the ground.
Jimmy Johnson cut Curvin Richards after he fumbled twice in the last regular season game, which was meaningless for the Cowboys since they already wrapped up their division, but he wanted to send a clear message.
Deflategate Mystery solved:
It`s done with MAGNETS:
Neodymium-Nickel Super-Magnets inside the Patriots` gloves and flexible leather-looking Neodymium-Nickel Super-Magnetic refrigerator magnets glued to the outside of the football.
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