The potential importance of the DeflateGate scandal and the findings of Ted Wells' report cannot be overstated.
At first blush, perhaps it seems questionable that the New England Patriots have now been docked two draft picks - one a first-rounder - and quarterback Tom Brady has been suspended the first four games of the 2015 season - though, after appeal, he'll likely miss only two, maybe three games - but after delving deeper into the statistics surrounding the Pats almost unimaginable run of success, it's easier to see why NFL commissioner Roger Goodell came down so hard on the league's New England franchise.
First, a bit of history.
In the 2006 offseason, Brady and Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning were at the forefront of a movement to allow all NFL quarterbacks pre-game access to the footballs to be used by their team on offense so that they could prepare them in their preferred manner.
"The thing is, every quarterback likes it a little bit different," Brady said at the time, per The Sun-Sentinel. "Some like them blown up a little bit more, some like them a little more thin, some like them a little more new, some like them really broken in."
Of course, that still meant the league would require the balls be inflated to a pre-specified level, but it added another step to the preparation process and - presumably - another opportunity to doctor the balls to a state possibly beyond the letter of the law.
Against that historical backdrop, a look into the unmatched success - overall, of course, but also in terms of ball security - enjoyed by Brady, Bill Belichick and the Patriots in the seasons since 2007 reveals an incredibly questionable correlation.
Warren Sharp of Slate published an article in January documenting the unprecedented and almost unfathomable ball security the Patriots have enjoyed in the years since that rule was passed.
He started by looking at two separate time periods for the Belichick-Brady-led Pats - 2000-2006 and 2007-2014 - and their plays run versus fumbles in comparison to the rest of the league.
What he found was astounding. (**As Sharp notes, teams who play indoors historically fumble less than those who play in outdoor stadiums, something he has addressed in previous research, so he does not include dome teams in his statistical analysis).
"Once again, a key takeaway is deadly obvious: Prior to 2007 the Patriots were right in line with the league averages across the other nondome teams. When you look team by team, they literally are in the middle of the pack for most seasons. But starting in 2007, all similarities totally vanish," Sharp writes.
"The statistical "jump" the Patriots make in the 2006 offseason, from one fumble every 39 plays to one fumble every 76 plays is nothing short of remarkable. Their trend line over this period is not even close to that of the rest of the NFL."
Could it just be dumb luck that has caused the Pats to make such a drastic turnaround in ball security?
John Candido, a data scientist at ZestFinance, doesn't think so.
"Based on the assumption that plays per fumble follow a normal distribution, you'd expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten since 2007 once in 5,842 instances," Candido writes, per Sharp.
"Which in layman's terms means that this result only being a coincidence is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0001711874 probability to win. In other words, it's very unlikely that results this abnormal are only due to the endogenous nature of the game."
There's also Brady's passer rating to consider - in the seven seasons prior to the rule change, Brady never posted a rating above 92.6. Since then, he has averaged a passer rating of 99.66 and gone over 100 three times.
Of course, there's every possibility that the Patriots have developed some type of in-house training to limit fumbles lost or that they target specific players based on their ball security acumen, but it seems unlikely due to the fact that, as Sharp reveals in two other articles, the Patriots have enjoyed unprecedented ball security in bad weather conditions and, perhaps most alarming, Patriots players tend to fumble more when they play for other teams - either before or after performing in New England.
"Individual players who played on New England during the 2007-14 span and on other teams fumbled 46% less often ON the Patriots as compared to on their other teams (98 touches/fumble on NE, 67 on other teams)."
One of the main points Sharp gleaned from his analysis is that supposed ball possession skills learned in New England did not transfer to other NFL teams after the players left New England.
"Individual players who played on the Patriots fumbled 88% more often after LEAVING the Patriots as they did when playing on the Patriots (105 touches/fumble on NE, 56 after NE on other teams)."
Whether all this points to Brady's alleged deflation of footballs or not, can't be proved, but it does raise some interesting questions as the NFL viewing world does its best to digest the findings of the Wells Report and the sanctions meted out to Brady and the Pats.
There's simply no denying, though, that New England has enjoyed a major advantage over the rest of the league in terms of ball security since 2007, the year Brady's rule change took effect, and that the only common threads in the ever-changing cast of personnel up and down the Patriots roster and amongst the coaching staff, are Brady and Belichick.
