here's a pats thread for everyone to talk about patritos shit because nobody else cares

someone on twitter made the good point that if jimmy g plays week 1 there is a reasonable chance he is the best starting qb in the division by default.

xxp - http://regressing.deadspin.com/why-those-statistics-about-the-patriots-fumbles-are-mos-1681805710

tannehill ain't bad/is likely to improve, but even so...that's not saying much, like at all, so i would not be particularly comforted if i were a fan!

him being the best in the AFC east is not saying much, that is

it's good there's no way he'd have to face miami bc suh would adore the chance to rip jimmy g's spine in half and eat the surrounding flesh, he'll have to make to with touchdown tom

*make do

haters gonna hate:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/fivethirtyeight-dissects-the-deflategate-report/

benm: I think the much-maligned study by Warren Sharp about the Patriots having a low fumble rate should be taken more seriously, for sure. I mean, though it had flaws, at a very minimum that author correctly identified that the Patriots fumble rate has been absurdly small. I did my own calculations using binomial and Poisson models and found the same. <snip>
But the fun part is when you get all Bayesian about it. As I said at the time, the existence of the Patriots’ extremely low fumble rate, as a Bayesian matter, makes it much more likely that the Patriots were intentionally cheating – even though the link between fumble rates and inflation levels is only speculative. That’s the beauty of Bayesianism. But it gets better: Now that it seems likely that the Patriots were violating the rules to gain an advantage, the fact that they also had an extremely low fumble rate makes it more likely that the relationship between inflation levels and fumbling is real – and more likely that the Patriots have materially benefited from their cheating.
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/pasted_image_at_2015_05_06_11_58_am.png?w=610

i'd equate throwing underinflated footballs with a baseball pitcher throwing spitballs. ... as every pitch he throws during the seventh game of a league championship series.

that 538 thing is so stupid it makes my head spin. i mean, ignore the fact that one of the issues is that the dataset itself is bullshit, and read what the guy wrote. after waving exciting words like poisson and bayesian around like a magic trick, his actual conclusion is that, although there is no evidence for causality, the existence of coincidence implies causality. it is basically the most wrong thing a "data journalist" can write. maybe the guy has already lost his job, we can only hope.

Sorry, coming in to this late, but doesn't it seem like under-inflated balls would help more with dropped passes than fumbles?

xp lost his job lol dude are you serious

it is a football team, its poor besieged saint sebastian is being hated on and the organization is being mocked, partially w/ good reason partially in a way thats going too far...

somehow you will survive, we all will

one of the guys in the 538 convo is a pats fan and he's chill with it!

the reason I stopped weighing in on Deflategate is because, as a Boston resident who hates the Boston sports teams, it was becoming quickly apparent that very few people around me shared my incredulous delight at how ridiculous this entire thing had become and I was in danger of losing friends if I talked about it

pats is serious, man

i'd equate throwing underinflated footballs with a baseball pitcher throwing spitballs.

... as every pitch he throws during the seventh game of a league championship series.

well, yes, if he were a spitball pitcher, and if he and his team were good enough to get to the seventh game of a league championship series, that's exactly what he would try to do.

xp yea as someone who also lives here and is into the sox and celtics (bc those were my folks' teams) but not the pats (for that and other reasons), it's been a colorful time around here in the bars and on twitter

it baffles me - you'd be hard-pressed to find a sox fan, myself included, who won't be like, "yeaaaaah manny probably did some PEDs after they were ruled illegal and ortiz definitely did before the ban and maybe after."

but right now, of my pats fan friends, exactly one of them has been "they probably did some dumb shit they didn't need to do" and the rest are in full-on homerific "it's a CONSPIRACY" mode

but how many sox fans are like, ortiz should be suspended for a quarter of a season and the sox should forfeit a first round draft pick?

also, i don't think anyone would be repping hard for magic johnson and walt frazier if they were PED users, but no one seems to care that magic's lakers were ball inflaters and fraziers knicks were ball deflaters. and they were/are not alone.

well also keep in mind that some of this is blowback from the Pats having a deranged murderer on their roster

if manny had been caught straight up during his sox tenure, i wouldn't have liked a huge suspension but would've grinned and bore it, not allege that it was a conspiracy of #haters jealous the sox and their #rangz

and im on record upthread as saying the draft pick part of the penalty was too steep, thats a fair complaint afaic

xp *jealous of the

i don't think it's unfair to call about the obvious homerism here, and the patriots attract that just like they attract deranged murderers (are they any other kind?) and ball deflaters. but i also think it's kind of obvious why a reaction to balls being slightly underinflated would be markedly different from the reaction to players using steroids.

i don't think it's unfair to call OUT...

fair point. better example would be the clay buchholz pine tar rumors. they weren't proven, but if they had been, i would be like, alright this sucks but the rules are the rules and the argument that they are dumb and arbitrary has to be dealt with elsewhere, serve the penalty, come back & make em pay from the mound

that's a fair point too. and that's pretty much how i feel. i think the accusations were overblown, i think the investigation was ridiculously overblown, and i think the punishment is probably deserved (even if awkwardly delivered).

(and, yeah, not a fan of the draft pick penalty either! but i figure what ends up happening is they get to show off jimmy g for four games, which is enough make him valuable enough to eventually trade him for a pretty good draft pick in return.)

worst case scenario: they lose four straight, brady comes back and they win almost all of the rest and prob at very least make the wild card and its off to the races from there, bc even with the other AFC east teams' free agent acquisitions they all have sizable holes that even a touchdown tomless version of the pats doesn't really have

well also keep in mind that some of this is blowback from the Pats having a deranged murderer on their roster

I would guess most of it is from Spygate

ha I forgot about Spygate

pats is serious, man

― DJP, Wednesday, May 13, 2015 3:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah as a pats fan its weird to me that ppl cant enjoy this more especially since the cheating occurred during a season in which the patriots won the superbowl, like its a good opportunity to gloat if anything, but also i have already come to terms with the fact that football is inherently evil and shd be outlawed

well, yeah, there's always that

i'm totally cool with fans who are fine w/ the team being heels (the lagoon perspective), especially given the inherent outsized absurdity of american football which should naturally have heels and faces (and sort of does but not all the way), but i feel like a lot of the fanbase got carried away with the idea of the way and the system that kraft pushed to great success, and view the team as more noble and #american than 30 bald eagles flying at once

its so crazy to me that ppl believe in stuff like that?

tbf you can't expect too much from ppl made of straw

lol yes im totally inventing those people, no way they exist

um tyranny of low expectations much

the idea of #ways and shit like that used to be more of a baseball thing and still totally is a baseball thing for numerous teams, and tbf the pats are by no means the only NFL team to peddle such ideas on an organizational level! but it is done on such a massive scale for a lot of reasons

i feel like a lot of the fanbase got carried away with the idea of the way and the system that kraft pushed to great success, and view the team as more noble and #american than 30 bald eagles flying at once

have 30 bald eagles flying at once ever intercepted a russell wilson pass at the goal line in the waning seconds of a super bowl? no they have not. case closed.

(cont. xp) plenty of which have to do with the marketability of brady and the obvious success/strategic genius of bill

lol no only undrafted free agents who will probably be cut in training camp for obscurantist bill reasons or traded for a 7th round pick xp

i haven't read the report or basically anything about this but the belief that brady and belichick weren't 100% in on this seems pretty naive to me

lag∞n otm, which you may have noticed is an anagram of tom

one thing i feel like ppl dont appreciate enough in all this is how handsome and cool tom brady is

brady is handsome in the way a man who knows for a fact that he is handsome is handsome

anyway, whatever. pats won, no one deep down truly thinks that psi had anything to do with it, and presumably bb will give his inclination to run up the score even freer rein

~gronk flex~

ffs this isn't complicated, the psychology of the average pats fan is that they are a person who loves tom brady, the way one would love a kind, generous, and decent relative.

pats fan reaction to this is literally how you would feel if someone wronged a member of your family

i only feel that way when ppl make fun of his uggs

xp I get that part, obviously. what I don't get is people literally shouting conspiracy and they are not joking! ted wells doesn't have a grudge against touchdown tom, and goodell is literally a robert kraft employee

and has been, more or less openly, since he became commissioner

i think conspiracy is too strong but there is a cast of characters involved in this thing who strongly give the impression that the patriots hurt their feelings

ffs this isn't complicated, the psychology of the average pats fan is that they are a person who loves tom brady

tru; as a steelers fan i have more experience in the semantics that separate quarterback from team/fandom