The Patriots rarely lose fumbles...and its statistically crazy.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/ballghazi_the_new_england_patriots_lose_an_insanely_low_number_of_fumbles.html

Could the Patriots be so good that they just defy the numbers? As my friend theorized: Perhaps they’ve invented a revolutionary in-house way to protect the ball, or perhaps they’ve intentionally stocked their skill positions with players who don’t have a propensity to fumble. Or perhaps, still, they call plays that intentionally result in a lower percentage of fumbles. Or maybe it’s just that they play with deflated footballs on offense. It could be any combination of the above.

But regardless of what, specifically, is causing these numbers, the fact remains: This is an extremely abnormal occurrence and is not simply random fluctuation.

The_Dude wrote:Lol at the pussification of society. Good Lord.

LoneWolfSparty wrote:

Your incessant defense of cheaters is quite astounding. Do you advocate rules breaking in all walks of life or just football where vast amounts of cash are in play?

The_Dude wrote:Lol at the pussification of society. Good Lord.

The_Dude wrote:Naw LWS every QB punter and kicker for decades have been doctoring balls. Your faux outrage over one incident that had no bearing on the outcome of the game is beyond hilarious.

Thats the problem with society today. Everyone feels they need to be outraged over non issues. I just sit back and laugh at all the pussy bonars. If you are truly upset over what happened with the deflation of balls I'd say get a fucking life. Good Lord.

Ass Dan wrote:I'd prefer if the dude never attempts to lecture me on what is "wrong with society" again. Lunatic.

Other Teams Pursuing That wrote:

this. is it just me or does he have to rant about society in every single fucking thread? shit gets old.

DWags wrote:

He seems very angry. Must be a blast at parties.

Likewise, it’s difficult to estimate the true odds against a team preventing fumbles to the extent Sharp originally suggested New England did. Knowing particulars about the Patriots after the fact can bias us into computing the odds that a specific team would have a specific fumble record over a specific period of years. But the real question regarding New England’s outlier-ness should surround the odds that any team would post any outlier statistic over any span of seasons. And the probability of that happening, as you may imagine, is a lot higher than the odds of a very specific set of circumstances.

Here were some of the responses to Sharp’s posts:

At Deadspin, statistics professors Gregory J. Matthews and (friend of FiveThirtyEight) Michael Lopez wrote a great, FireJoeMorgan-style, line-by-line takedown of Sharp’s most popular post. They refuted the 1-in-16,234 number (by Sharp’s own methodology it should be more like 1-in-297) and pointed out a massive data error in Sharp’s analysis of individual players (he mixed together some data that included special teams plays and some that excluded them). Matthews and Lopez also broke down team fumble rates by position, after which New England’s running backs and receivers don’t really look like major fumble-preventing outliers at all.
SoSH Football Central’s Daryl Sng broke down Sharp’s aforementioned data errors in even greater detail. After excluding kick and punt returns (which make no sense to include because teams don’t have any access to “K balls”) and correcting for Sharp’s original mishmash of regular-season and playoff data, the players in Sharp’s sample fumbled only about 23 percent more as non-Patriots, not 88 percent as was originally stated.
Political scholar Bill Herman also zeroed in on Sharp’s analysis of individual players’ fumble rates with the Patriots and other teams, identifying its aforementioned methodological errors. In addition, he looked at the six players featured in Michael Salfino’s Wall Street Journal article based on Sharp’s work, finding that their difference in fumbling was statistically significant. Of those six players (Danny Amendola, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Danny Woodhead, Wes Welker, Brandon LaFell and LeGarrette Blount), four were common to Sng’s dataset, but both analyses found a 23 percent increase in fumbling while playing for teams other than New England.
Like Matthews and Lopez, data analyst Tom Hayden repudiated Sharp’s assumption that his “plays per fumble” metric was normally distributed across NFL teams (a necessary condition for the 1-in-16,234 claim).
The harshest counterargument belonged to data scientist Drew Fustin. Fustin challenged Sharp’s choice to exclude dome teams (Sharp’s own post says outdoor teams barely fumble more often than those based in domes), instead looking at fumble rates across all teams in outdoor games only — whereupon the Patriots don’t even rank first in the NFL at fumble avoidance over the 2010-2014 period. He also questions whether Sharp’s decision to use that 2010-14 period was a case of cherry-picking the timeframe that would make the Patriots look most like an extreme outlier.