Another thing to consider is the Pats home winning %. I haven't done the math, but my bet is their home field "advantage" is probably statistically improbable. And it's a lot easier to cheat at home
Yup it actually is. From 2003 here's the data: https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/trends/win_trends/?range=yearly_since_2003&sc=is_home Mean league-wide home win% = 56.93% with a standard deviation of 11.25%. 2 S.D. out is 79.42% and only one team has a home win% greater than that = NE at 84.96% so yes NE is the only team with a home win% that is statistically speaking unlikely to come from the league-wide distribution. Keep in mind though that in a 32 team league, you'd expect 0.73 teams (rounded = 1) to be above 2 S.D. So on one hand this shows the distribution of league home win% is what you'd expect, but it also shows that one team (NE) is doing something that's unlikely enough that you can reject the hypothesis it comes from the league-wide distribution.
I totally agree with their shenanigans at home. But you'd have to some tests on how far, if any they are above normal, at home. The est would be against other playoff teams, or other teams, like the 1980s 49ers who had similar long periods of domi ation, not runof the. Mill teams.
Let me add the away win percentage results since 2003 because there's an interesting observation: https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/trends/win_trends/?range=yearly_since_2003&sc=is_away NE is once again the only team that is at least 2 S.D. above the mean away win% which is 42.42% with S.D. = 10.59%. Here's the thing: NE's away win% of 69.23% is 2.531 standard deviations above the mean, while NE's home win% of 84.96% is 2.4921 standard deviations above the mean. Which means NE does NOT have a greater relative advantage to the rest of the league at home vs. away. Anyway.. keep in mind these results don't tell you WHY this is occurring. Nevertheless, this home vs. away analysis does show that IF they're cheating there's no evidence they do it better at home.
Can't get a quick link to the relevant data, but home win% has remained fairly constant for long enough that I think the quickest way to get an idea of what you're talking about is to just assume the stats I listed (mean and standard deviation) from 2003-2016 are the same in the 80's and 90's and then look at the home win% of various QB's. For example: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/MontJo01/splits/ https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/Y/YounSt00/splits/ Almost all of Montana's and Young's years were with that 49er team you're talking about. Calculate their combined home win% and you get around 70% which wouldn't put them close to where the Patriots are. Anyway, you can play around with QB splits to see if there's someone that gets you to ~80% home win% or ~67% away win%. The data should be for a similar length of time though (14 years for the stats above). If I can find the raw data in easy to read (for a computer) format.. I'll write a program to test every possibility, but I can't yet find the data in such a format!
Just found out something disturbing about pro-football-reference: their W-L records include games where the QB didn't even start, which often includes games where they attempted no passes at all!! For proof look at Montana's splits and career game logs: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/MontJo01/splits/ https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/MontJo01/gamelog/ Both in the splits and game logs you have 192 regular season games for Montana. Yeah.. well look at the the "GS" column for "games started" in that career gamelog link and a bunch of those games (many of which are losses) in Montana's first few years he didn't start a game and didn't even attempt a single pass! The reason I caught onto this is because the stats in the post above (#165) just didn't add up in terms of number of games played and something seemed fishy with such a low home win% (you'll see why that occurred in a moment). OK.. so filtering by games started, here are the real W-L stats for home/away for Montana and Young. Oh, and be prepared for a surprise for Montana: Montana (at 49ers): Home record: 46 wins, 25 losses = 64.79% home win% Away record: 54 wins, 14 losses = 79.41% away win% Young (at 49ers): Home record: 54 wins, 9 losses = 85.71% home win% Away record: 37 wins, 24 losses = 60.66% away win% That Montana home vs. away stat is for real and not an error. You can check it yourself with the link above (make sure you only count those cases where GS = *). So Montana was unbelievably good away but pretty poor at home. So that and the fact PFR doesn't filter by games started in W-L record (REALLY stupid!) explains why the overall home win% was so low. So the real 49er stats for Montana + Young combined are: home win% = 74.63% and away win% = 70.54%. The 49ers are an interesting case. They're as good as NE away but not as good at home. In terms of going to the playoffs and winning SB's they were similarly impressive. From 1981-1998 they won the SB 5 times and went to the playoffs 16 out of 18 years: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/sfo/
And yet no one was calling them cheaters during that period of time. Yes, I know of the stickum and Montana's claims, but other than the stickum I don't think they did anything close to what the Pats have been doing.
I can agree with that. However, what the posts in the last few pages show is that it's going to be hard to argue just based on NE's success alone that the level of cheating is far beyond what we already know because there are similarly successful teams, not just in the NFL but in other leagues. Their success is certainly consistent with cheating, but it's also consistent with just being a great team without cheating.
Yeah, but as resnor alluded to earlier, the Pats are doing it at a time when no other team has come close and shouldn't be able to because of the cap. The NBA and MLB have dynasties, but they are ran differently than the NFL in regards to how a team is built. As for what we know, I'll repeat myself, why did the NFL destroy all the evidence without allowing anyone to look at it? I mean, Goodall (who was best buds with Kraft at the time) saw the Pats cheating vault and within minutes ordered it all to be destroyed.
That rabbithole was very very deep imo. Beyond damage control. Thats why they destroyed the evidence. The NFL lost a lot of its integrity in my eyes that day. I mean, who watches the watchmen?
Yeah, I've already shown reasons why comparing to other sports is not accurate, and mores, going back 50+ years is basically worthless, as all leagues are much different today than back then.
Yeah, just to recapitulate: I initially thought resnor's post #153 made a good point about taking parity issues into account because I didn't think about that in post #152, but then I started to do some research, and as you can see in posts #155 and #157 I started to realize my assumption about differences in parity between the MLB vs. NFL making the 1995-2012 Yankees not a good comparison to NE were wrong. They are in fact a great comparison. There are others that have studied the issues of league parity and come to the same conclusion. For example, a "Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (HSAC)" shows NFL and MLB have similar levels of parity, at least since 2009: That graph fits with what I found too. For example, 18 different MLB teams made it to the WS since 2000 while 19 different NFL teams made it to the SB since 2000. And others have found that the turnover in playoff teams (percentage of teams that made the playoffs in a given year that didn't make it in the previous year) is similar for both leagues. What this suggests is that two factors, one that should decrease parity in MLB and one that should nullify that mechanism (at least for making the playoffs or winning a championship), are more or less canceling each other out. The lack of a salary cap in MLB should decrease parity but it's also much harder to make the playoffs in the MLB. Either 8 out of 30 or 10 out of 30 teams = at most 30% in the MLB that make the playoffs while in the NFL it's 12/32 = 37.5%. That graph suggests these effects tend to cancel out. Furthermore, you can see that the overwhelming amount of additional money the Yankees spent in many years between 1995-2012 relative to the rest of the league: http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm doesn't improve their chances of winning: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-your-favorite-baseball-team-blows-its-money/ That gray curve is MLB league average, showing that spending more (x-axis) in standard deviation units above the mean increases win% from 50% to about 60%. However, note that for the Yankees the effect of spending more tapers off before reaching +2 S.D. meaning that it's irrelevant how much more they spend next to the next highest spending team for purposes of increasing win%. Point is, NFL and MLB have similar levels of parity in recent decades. The 1995-2012 Yankees won 5 World Series (similar to 5 SB's for NE), lost 2 World Series (just like NE lost 2 SB's), and otherwise made the playoffs 10 out of the remaining 11 seasons. The number of teams in the league was similar and parity for making the playoffs or winning a WS or SB is similar. So yes this is a great comparison. btw.. the parity issue can be pointed out if you try to compare NE to the Spurs because NBA has less parity. I also don't mind disregarding stuff from 50+ years back, but keep in mind you can calculate the probability of winning 11 out 13 championships with X number of teams in the league vs. 6 out of 8 with Y number of teams in the same league. So it's not that you can't compare, but that it takes more work to compare.
I'm not sure how you can try to argue that spending more money didn't help the Yankees, while still talking about how dominant they were in that period. They could go out and buy whatever player they wanted. In the NFL, all teams can spend the same. In baseball, that was not the case.
Like I said.. just look at the data: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-your-favorite-baseball-team-blows-its-money/ Look at NYY there (each season is a dot). That proves that once the NYY spent 1.5+ S.D. above league average, any further amount of money they spent didn't improve win%. Can't argue with the data. And 1.5 S.D. is nowhere near the astronomical levels they spent in many years.
The chart you linked to seems to suggest the opposite. It seems that the Yankees spent the most and won the most. Their winning may have capped out at 1.5, but they were still winning more than any other team. Maybe I'm not seeing something? Anyhow, spending money doesn't necessarily make a team great. You have to have the money and the knowledge to pick the right people. However, if you have more money then you can afford to make more mistakes on the wrong player(s).
Then held a meeting with owners who mysteriously stopped feeling angry and said nothing other than they accepted Kraft's apology. Gag order anyone? Then we're told to "dig deeper" if we think they cheat. Well I dug deeper on this one and I will not name NFL employees, but according to the reaction of 3 of them, there is definitely a gag order and they are scared ****less to break it. Anyway, you can still lose now and then when you cheat and it is always fun to see.
You're reading that right though it's worth noting the Yankees were outperforming expectations based on spending levels. My reading of resnor's post #173 is that he was responding to my claim that "it's irrelevant how much more the NYY spend next to the next highest spending team for purposes of increasing win%". And that graph shows that's true because win% for the Yankees tapers off from 1.5 S.D. At least that's what I'm guessing resnor was responding to. I mean I explicitly said this in post #172: So I don't see how someone could read that to mean spending per se doesn't help. The point of post #172 was to provide evidence that despite spending more helping, it's offset by other factors and the actual parity seen in making the playoffs or winning a championship are similar between the MLB and NFL. Hope that's clear?
Interesting about the Yankes. I think some of the explanation about the benefits of tapering off include 1) You can only spend on Free agents. Most of the best talent gets locked up on long term contracts, so some of that excess is not spent efficiently because its spent on the best player available, not the best player at the positiion. 2) the highest level players of any sport want to play, not sit on the pine as a reserve watching someone else play. Players can and do sacrifice salary for opportunities to be a starter. You van see this happen in European soccer leagues too. 3) you have a limited number of players that can be on the field at any one time. Having greater depth than your opponent doesn't help you much if your opponent has healthy starters. The difference in depth of talent becomes more obvious when your opponents have key players lost to injury.
Brady's playing great so far, and he's doing it without any good receivers (though he does have Gronk). Still.. I think what you're seeing says more about the Saints pass defense than anything else. Saints were 31st in pass defense in 2015, dead last in 2016 and they're on track to beat all records for pass yards given up in 2017 LOL How Brady plays against Houston next game will really show where he is. Houston has a great pass defense (ranked 2nd last year). If Brady does well there, then we'll know for sure calls of his demise were premature. EDIT: Gronk just re-injured his back and might be out for awhile.. we'll see. Man if NE loses Gronk too they'll have NO offensive weapons (except Brady obviously).
"New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski suffered a groin injury during the second half of Sunday's 36-20 victory over the New Orleans Saints and didn't return to the game. Gronkowski suffered the injury on a 21-yard reception during the third quarter of Sunday's game. Gronkowski was initially ruled as questionable to return after he was examined on the sideline by team trainers. The injury is the latest setback for the dominating tight end. Gronkowski ended the 2016 season on injured reserve due to a back injury. Gronk's groin aliment doesn't appear to be as serious, however. The tight end told reporters "I'm good" following the game, per ESPN's Mike Reiss." http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap30...wski-suffers-groin-injury-in-patriots-victory
