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Robert Kraft and the patriots cheating

Anyone notice a key play in the 3rd quarter on what should have been a 15 yd w RAC to Lockett? Butler fell down as he was beaten, he reached out with his hand as far as he could to intentionally trip Lockett - it's all he could do to try and stop a big play. Blatant PI. No call.
 
Without Brady and Belicheat would New England have any SB rings....probably not.

Brady is just a cog in Belicheat's system. In 2008, Matt Cassell led them to an 11-5 season and barely missed playoffs. This same Matt Cassell, wasn't even a starting QB in college and wasn't very good when he left NE.

If they can do that with a very mediocre QB like Cassell, then they can win Super Bowls with a slightly better QB like Garoppolo.
 
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Really guys? This is so sad. You think the Patriots 14 year reign in the NFL is because they cheat? Because Goodell favors them?

That's just sour grapes talk.

Yes, I am beginning to believe that. And it's not sour grapes. If it were sour grapes, I'd be pissed . . . but still believe my team actually had the same chance to win in the NFL as the Patriots do.

After what's occurred this season with the Patriots, added onto what's occurred with them in the past; I'm thinking of dropping the NFL as a sport I care about. If that happens, 45 years of fandom ruined because no one who runs the NFL seems to care about the integrity of the game. It's a shame, but I'm not fool enough to put up with it forever. I just won't.
 
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Really guys? This is so sad. You think the Patriots 14 year reign in the NFL is because they cheat? Because Goodell favors them?

That's just sour grapes talk.

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?
 
NFL is getting boring especially in the AFC where either Brady, Roethlisberger or Manning is in the SuperBowl every year. This New England team wasn't even that good but the league is watered down. No really good teams like we had last year with Denver and Seattle. League looks to be weak this upcoming year as well.
 
Really guys? This is so sad. You think the Patriots 14 year reign in the NFL is because they cheat? Because Goodell favors them?

That's just sour grapes talk.

Its a game of inches and the favoritism doesn't have to be flagrant. They get a lot more leeway than other teams. The relationship between Goodell and Kraft is almost incestuous.
It is certainly a contributing factor. They are a good team and made to look better because of it.
 
Without Brady and Belicheat would New England have any SB rings....probably not.

Without cheating would either of those 2 guys have accomplished much? Lots of close games won with a little extra illegal edge. Definitely no SB wins without cheating. They all came down to 3 points or less, or one play last week.
 
Not this stuff again. Don't conclude your remarkss with "now I'm not going full blown conspiracy on this" when in fact your whole purpose was to flog a conspiracy theory. You've remained true to every archetypal conspiracy theorist known to mankind. You cut and paste an extract from a five-year old article that says absolutely nothing other than Kraft is a valuable man to the NFL and from that inane observation conclude from it that the league protects him and his team. This is banality cubed. You just let an accusation hang there with no evidence, consider no other possibilities and just let a set of random facts be associated with a nefarious supposition of your own making. You even go so far as to imagine the Patriots get preferential treatment from the officials. Kraft is influential ergo the league protects him and coddles him to the detriment of the other 31 owners, many of them quite influential in the league. Listen to Redskins' fans talk about the Maras and how they got Goodell to punish the Redskins severely for violating the salary cap a few years ago. This crap is 90% about envy, ego and the inability of fans to deal with losing. It's the insatiable need to belittle accomplishments their team is incapable of attaining.

And it gets really sickening when fans try to couch this stuff in hyperbole about protecting the "integrity of the game" as if that's really what it's about. They talk about Spygate for instance without really understanding what exactly the Patriots were accused of doing and how it wasn't even against the rules until September 2006. They talk about debunked nonsense like the taping of walk-throughs before the Super Bowl as if it was an unquestioned fact and not the fabrication it turned out to be, leading the Boston Herald to retract the story and place an apology in the paper not once, but twice, something newspapers are loath to do fearing it will undermine their journalistic credibility. If it's not about the Patriots and it's really about the integrity of the game how come when Jimmy Johnson goes on Fox Sports and admits being taught how to do it by a Chiefs' scout 20-years ago and actively doing it himself with the Cowboys, no one cares? When Cowher goes on 96.7 in Pittsburgh and says the Steelers did it no one cares? When the Jets and Broncos get caught doing it, no one cares? When 6 or 7 NFL teams are under investigation by the DEA for the illegal prescription of painkillers, the most prevalent form of PED in the league, it doesn't even register as cheating, because no one associates a low pain tolerance as a physical limitation like being slow or weak that needs to be overcome.

You want to talk about the integrity of the game when guys like Lawrence Taylor admit to doing copious amounts of cocaine, one of the greatest stimulants modern chemistry has ever devised, at halftime during the Super Bowl? Is anyone familiar with Hollywood Henderson's mea culpa about sticking a small spray bottle in his pants containing a cocaine/water solution and spraying it in his mouth between plays during the second Cowboys/Steelers Super Bowl? Where is the outrage if this hand-wringing is about preserving the integrity of the game? And even if your defense is everyone was on roids and coke in the 70s and 80s or it didn't violate a specific rule at the time, all of which is true, it only feeds into the double-standard that is applied to the Pats. Since Deflate-gate we've since been informed that there must have been systematic underinflation going back years since starting in 2007 the Pats' rate of fumbling has decreased from being one of the worst in the league at home to one of the best. Well obviously it must be underinflated balls, it can't be that the Pats replaced the personnel that were fumbling the ball so damn much before then! And no one questions why the conspiracy theorists pick 2007 as a cut off point for statistical purposes or what that even means really (obviously they picked 2007 because that's when Spygate broke and once the spotlight was on that, the Pats had to go to some other form of cheating.)

This is all conspiracy theorizing of the most ridiculous sort, but it's par for the course. Even if they're exonerated they're not really exonerated. You can't prove a negative, and anything exculpatory just becomes further fuel for the conspiracy theorist, a lack of real evidence is just further proof to the conspiracy guys that something grander is at play, some dark lord of the Sith standing behind the curtain manipulating the process. Goodell suppresses the evidence because he's Kraft's buddy. Pats fans think Goodell persecutes them because he used to work for the Jets, it's all thinking of the same ilk and Dolphins fans just look the part of a rabble that hasn't won anything in so long it's made us lose all perspective.


Great post. Thanks
 
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.
 
Gabriel Sherman outlines just how close Goodell and Kraft have been and how it was Kraft that backed Goodell during the uproar over how the league handled the Ray Rice domestic assault scandal.

According to the story, when the Rice case began to spin out of control, it was Kraft who arranged for Goodell to do his first on-air interview, on CBS with a woman as the interviewer. It was also Kraft who lobbied other owners to publicly support Goodell.

Goodell and Kraft were so close, at least one NFL executive refers to Kraft as "the assistant commissioner."


https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/nfl-commissioner-roger-goodell-could-173717758.html
 
This, IMO, is the best analysis yet:

http://www.advancedfootballanalytic...ysis/team-analysis/227-a-look-at-ne-s-fumbles


It won't change any minds...

Its is clear something changed in Patriotland after 2006 when Brady lobbied the league to have control of his own balls.

I think the more accurate study on fumbles should look at runningbacks alone....as they are the players, that for most part, have a firm grip on the ball when contact is made.

Quarterbacks get hit in awkward positions often with the ball in one hand and not in a secure position.

And receivers often get hit and fumble before the ball is tucked.

The primary advantage of deflation for QB's would be controling the ball when throwing.....and for receivers catching the ball.

For example...New England's 4 runningbacks had 0(zero) fumbles in 2014.

Is New England a good team?....Yes.

Did deflation in the specific case of the AFC Championship game or the SuperBowl make a difference...no obviously not.

Bur that does not mean it didn't help them win key games since 2007 before they were caught...afterall....the turnover battle is a key to winning.

The ironic thing to me is...just as they got nabbed for spygate...they had already begun a new way of cheating to get an advantage.

And all the disgrace and penalties from spygate did not deter them at all.

So the questions begs to be answered...what other rulebreaking goes on there?....Does anyone doubt they would?

We know for example they turn in false injury reports......how many opposing playbooks has Belichek obtained from released players he signs?

The bottomline is the integrity of the game....why have rules if they do not have to be followed?
 
Its is clear something changed in Patriotland after 2006 when Brady lobbied the league to have control of his own balls.

I think the more accurate study on fumbles should look at runningbacks alone....as they are the players, that for most part, have a firm grip on the ball when contact is made.

Quarterbacks get hit in awkward positions often with the ball in one hand and not in a secure position.

And receivers often get hit and fumble before the ball is tucked.

The primary advantage of deflation for QB's would be controling the ball when throwing.....and for receivers catching the ball.

For example...New England's 4 runningbacks had 0(zero) fumbles in 2014.

Is New England a good team?....Yes.

Did deflation in the specific case of the AFC Championship game or the SuperBowl make a difference...no obviously not.

Bur that does not mean it didn't help them win key games since 2007 before they were caught...afterall....the turnover battle is a key to winning.

The ironic thing to me is...just as they got nabbed for spygate...they had already begun a new way of cheating to get an advantage.

And all the disgrace and penalties from spygate did not deter them at all.

So the questions begs to be answered...what other rulebreaking goes on there?....Does anyone doubt they would?

We know for example they turn in false injury reports......how many opposing playbooks has Belichek obtained from released players he signs?

The bottomline is the integrity of the game....why have rules if they do not have to be followed?

The change after 2007 is very hard to explain away other than the ball being manipulated to make it easier to hold on to. At this point, if there was a rational explanation for it, the Boston media should be reporting it instead of attacking the people who broke the story. I also wouldn't be surprised if they break the rules in other ways people haven't even thought about.
 
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