I second what ATL_PHIN_FAN said. One would have to be completely daft to dismiss any notion that cheating has played a significant role in the Patriots' sustained success. In as much as Warren Sharp's analysis demonstrates that the Patriots have impossibly fumbled far less than any other team in the NFL since 2007, it's likewise equally impossible that they have remained so dominant for as long as they have. What other team in the NFL has been such a consistent contender? I don't see any. Not even the Green Bay Packers have achieved such egregious success, and they've had back-to-back hall of fame QBs, but I guess they're just not that lucky.
I will totally quit the NFL if they opt to shrug this latest scandal off. In my eyes, the only rational response would be to seek charges against the Patriots. What more evidence is needed? To do nothing at this point only incriminates the NFL. If that's the case, why should anyone keep watching?
You guys should stop why you're way behind. Now you're going to cite Warren Sharp's debunked nonsense as evidence the Patriots have been deflating footballs since 2007? For those who do not know who Warren Sharp is, well, he's an amateur number-cruncher who runs a gambling website. He's a civil engineer by training. He made the claim that the Patriots fumble rate was "impossibly" low using a 5-year rolling average, or as he calculated 1 in 16,234. He then made another claim that Patriots players fumbled less on the Pats then they did when playing for other teams. This stuff was repeated all over the place and some of his analysis even made it into the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately for Sharp, he had no professional mathematicians or specialists in data analysis review his work and that was a mistake. His math was wrong and his methodology was pure garbage. He uses the wrong metrics like using fumbles-per-play instead of plays-per-fumble (not all plays are created equal, running plays are more likely to result in fumbles). His probability calculation assumes that fumbles are a random distribution, when fumbles are not a random distribution like say coin flips. (His 1 in 16,234 probability is actually 1 in 297.) His data sets initially included all fumbles as opposed to offensive fumbles, I don't know why he'd do this, since balls used on special teams are sent to the league directly by the manufacturer and never handled by the teams and thus could not be tampered with.
Sharp plays more games with the data sets by excluding dome teams supposedly because bad weather doesn't effect their fumbles (dome teams actually fumble more on average than outdoor teams), but it certainly does when those dome teams play outside a dome! Secondly, by eliminating dome teams altogether Sharp shrinks the actual data set for the entire league because when an outdoor team like the Pats play an indoor team whether at home or on the road it doesn't count in his numbers, and a smaller data set gives more skewed results, stats 101, the theory of large numbers. This just looks like a guy cherry picking data and it gets worse. He uses a 5-year rolling average, why? He claims the Pats have achieved some "impossibly" low fumble numbers when in fact they haven't even led the league in the stat. If you expunge the special team fumbles and just count the fumbles of the receivers, rbs and qbs they've ranked in the last 14 years: 5, 12, 11, 4, 4, 12, 7, 6, 10, 10, 11, 10, 13, 14.. He doesn't mention that the Colts also had a huge drop in the number of fumbles after the rule was changed. He doesn't account for the fact that fumbles lost isn't just a function of holding onto the ball, but also recovering it, which is known to be a largely random event, this is rather odd considering he conflates total fumbles as purely random, when they aren't, but doesn't have much to say about recoveries, which are, and do effect total fumbles lost. It just looks like more gaming of the numbers.
Sharp is suspicious of why the Patriots' rate of fumbling would decline and assumes nefarious deeds, but he doesn't even pay any mention to the fact that 2007 was the year the Patriots switched to a spread offense, which ran the ball much less, before then they were a more run-centric offense with running backs fumbling more. This is really weird when you consider Sharp's hobby is handicapping football games. I could go on and on. Think twice before citing Sharp's rubbish which doesn't prove what he purports it to prove. He's only shown that the Patriots are among the best teams at protecting the ball, a fact common to the better teams in the league, thus one of the reasons they're good! Then again, one should not be surprised by the invocation of Sharp's work when so many on here still talk about the Patriots taping walk-throughs as if it wasn't exposed as a hoax and the charge retracted by the journalist who originally made the claim. If outlier excellence was cheating, then someone better get on the case of Bill Walsh, Phil Jackson, and the Spurs, just to name 3.