Romo fumbles less in Cowboys Standium than he did at TS.
Must have been the hole on the roof that caused it. Or maybe good players work to improve upon their weaknesses. You think Andrew Luck finishes his career averaging 10 fumbles per year?
Romo and Luck haven't deflated footballs. In fact, the league actually proved that Luck did not deflate footballs.
And this goes beyond Brady as the entire team has dramatically reduced their fumble percentage since 2007.
And Romo's drop in fumble rate is not nearly at the drop in fumble and INT that Brady has had. He went from being very good at not fumbling and not throwing picks to historically phenomenal. All starting in 2007.
Right at the same time the Patriots were deflating footballs.
Since 2009, Patriots have the 4th or 5th highest dropped pass percentage in the NFL.
Yes, and there is some evidence that points to a deflating the footballs as being more difficult to catch, hence the enormous drop in INT's from Brady since 2007.
Sharps analysis is so shocking in part because he eliminated dome teams from the equation for some of his numbers, and more importantly because there's no mention of how QB play impacts fumble totals.
Look at both these and things settle down a bit. For example, since Flacco was drafted the Ravens have fumbled a lot more than the Pats. Remove QB fumbles from the equation and fumble totals are near identical. Same for Chargers since 2007.
Keep dome teams in and Atlanta is right on pace with the Pats over the last 7 or 8 years.
The problem is that Brian Burke did analysis of his own and showed that compared to outdoors teams, the Patriots are wayyyy better at not fumbling than anybody else and it happened right overnight....in 2007.
Here's the article.
http://www.advancedfootballanalytic...ral/224-the-patriots-have-great-ball-security
"Whoa. In this case NE is at the top of the list, and the next best team is a distant second. Notice how the second team (BLT) through the second to last team (PHI) have rates that are within 1 or 2 plays of each other. NE, however, is better than the next best team by 20 plays per fumble
You might notice that 2013 was a bit of a down year for NE ball security. That's partly due to the week 12 game against DEN in insanely frigid conditions. NE had 6 fumbles and Denver had 5. Extremely cold temperatures are associated with high fumble rates--They're about 35% more frequent than usual in the coldest games. But if we threw out that game, NE would have a 60 play-per-fumble rate. Not the best that season, but still better than any other outdoor team's 5-year average." - Brian Burke
Also, New England is not a heavy running team. I think running teams are less likely to fumble (depends on the tailbacks fumbling tendency) because they're likely to have better ball security than receivers. The next closest outdoor team is Baltimore which runs a lot. Carolina is a warm weather team (that runs a lot) and plays in a division with Tampa (warm weather), Atlanta and New Orleans (dome teams). New England plays in a division with 1 warm weather team (Miami) and the others...including their own home...where temperatures and weather conditions are very conducive to fumbling.
Not to mention that Brady's fumble rate reduced by 114%, this after 6 seasons as a starter and missing the entire 2008 season with an injury.
Compared to Romo whose fumble rate reduced by 76%, after 2.5 seasons as a starter...and playing in a dome-like stadium.
Oh, and let's not forget that Bill Belichick wrote the foreword to a little known book called
Football Physics which addressed things like how changing the properties in a football will affect its aerodynamics. Something tells me that they may have used that information in order to seize an unfair advantage. Why? Because they did the same thing at SpyGate.
YR
