It is exceptionally amusing to watch the mental gymnastics the P*ts fans are going through to try to defend Brady and Belichick.Several have gone so far as to don their tin-foil hats and claim that it is all a conspiracy by the league to get the P*ts because all the other owners are jealous of them, or some such nonsense. It is now being reported that the Colts became concerned about under-inflated balls against New England when they played them in November. This raises the question of just how long the P*ts have been doing this.
I think coach B gave us the answer recently in an attempt at misdirection. He was crediting their ugly defeat in Kansas City as being the turning point for their season. Well it certainly was when everything changed for Tom Brady. If you'll recall, at the beginning of the season the conventional wisdom was that Brady was washed up, much like Peyton Manning at the end of the season, lack of accuracy, lack of arm strength, fumbles, interceptions, looked uncomfortable playing in general. Then, as if by magic, Brady "came back to life." His passer rating in the first 4 games of the year was 79.1 and he had only completed 59.1% of his passes. Suddenly he went from mediocre to putting up a 110.6 PR against the Bengals on October 5th. His PR after those first four games was 103.0 and his completion percentage was 65.6. SOMETHING changed that made it easier for him to complete passes.
It also made it much easier for him to handle the ball. In the P*ts first 4 games, Brady fumbled the ball 5 times. He had zero fumbles the rest of the year. The P*ts tied a record for fewest fumbles this year while running far more plays than the teams from the past with whom they were tied. And while researching this I found an even more amazing statistic that dates back well before October 2014 ...
Deflated: The Statistically Impossible Patriots Fumble Record
Sharp Football Analysis analysis looked at the rate of fumbles by the Patriots offense over the last decade. The analysis had a number of shocking conclusions. First, the Patriots fumble only at a rate of once every 187 offensive snaps. As Sharp’s puts it, this is literally off the charts. It is a statistical outlier right from a statistics textbook.
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But it gets worse for Brady and the Patriots. Sharp Football Analysis was able to trace the emergence of this phenomena to a bright-line date: 2007. Starting in 2007, the Patriots suddenly began to hold onto the football at a statistical rate likely to occur 1 time in 16,233. A rational person might conclude this is the moment when someone on the Patriots cooked up the scheme to illegally deflate the ball:
As you can see, the Patriots won their Super Bowls having a below average rate of fumbles lost given today’s average of 105 plays/game. But in 2007, something happened to propel them to a much better rate (you’ll remember, that just so happened to be the same year they went 16-0 in the regular season). But even looking at these numbers, its clear how insane the 187 number is: they are almost running 100 MORE plays without a single fumble as compared to the 2002-2006 period when they won 2 of their 3 Super Bowls.
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When you consider that the Patriots play in cold, messy weather much of the season, having an advantage that visiting teams do not have creates even further separation from the rest of the NFL on game day in New England. The Pats have performed like a domed team in the worst of conditions.
And considering that the Colts initial concerns were when they were the home team ... in a dome, this negates the idea that the deflation is temperature related, or that it is necessarily the result of handling by the home team's designated ball manager after the balls have been tested.
Perhaps the NFL's investigation should include inspection of the affected balls for possible physical tampering. I could see the possibility of them finding a way to induce a very slow leak such that the balls would test fine at 12.5 PSI but then over the next few hours waiting for game time deflate a few pounds. Perhaps they got even bolder after the slow start with Brady's 5 fumbles and decided to increase the rate of leakage to make the balls even softer - which also made them vulnerable to being caught after all these years of cheating.
So whether this was just something that started this season, or whether it is something that has been going on for the past eight seasons, it does appear that the P*triots have been engaged in SOMETHING that has been giving them an unfair advantage. If it is indeed determined that they physically tampered with the balls, then Belichick should be banned for life and Brady should have every passing record marked with a Barry Bonds' style asterisk.
New England fans can scream "HATERS!!!" at the tops of their lungs as they live on in denial that their team's head coach and quarterback are cheaters. The question is not, "Did they cheat?" But rather, it is, "HOW did they cheat?"