Why is a conservative political thinktank doing research on footballs?

Anyway, remember how I was talking a few weeks ago about how you have to assume an extremely specific timeline (invented out of thin air by a Patriots fan) of what happened during the halftime measurements to come to this conclusion? These guys don't just assume it, they state it as fact in their report with no evidence.

Also, to reach their conclusion, they're assuming that a football is a rigid vessel. I don't think it is, do you?

Actually, he accepted it because there is really no way to fight it. The teams aren't subject to the collective bargaining agreement, and the bylaws give all power to the commissioner. His options were accept it or go full rogue and bring a lawsuit against Goodell and the League. Basically, the full Al Davis route.

And even then it's not clear how he could win. The NFL bylaws vest all power to adjudicate these types of things to the Commissioner.

Basically, the NFL clubs, long before Kraft or pretty much any of the current owners were involved, gave authority to the Commissioner to decide issues like this. Doesn't matter if any given club doesn't like it or not, there's very little recourse for them.

I'd just give it up, man. It's like arguing Kobe/LeBron with Arrow 2. You can post 1500 statistics that all point 1 way and it doesn't matter.

The owner of the team accepted the penalties levied for being caught cheating. He accepted them. That is not what innocent people do. It wasn't a plea bargain, it wasn't anything. The NFL said, "this is what we fine you. This is what you lose." And Kraft accepted that as is.

Anyone arguing that they didn't cheat, at this point, is a total ****ing idiot.

A football can be rigid enough a vessel to resist deformation at a certain pressure, which is all that matters in this case.

No, a rigid vessel means that the container has the same volume regardless of pressure, not that it resists deformation when at pressure. A football is not a rigid vessel.

ROFL

Yeah, right. It's all about choices and options. If your options/choices suck, then you do what you have to, even if it means swallowing a bitter pill.

There are millions of examples, from innocent people who can't afford to fight the charges so they plead guilty to something that doesn't carry jail time, to someone who decides to settle a discrimination claim because their choices are paying $5,000 to the shitty employee they fired or paying $25,000+ to lawyers to defend the claim, with an uncertain outcome, that will take a year or three to reach.

Or the person/company who got ****ed when the other side breached the contract, or didn't perform, who let them get away with it because they didn't want to deal with it, or couldn't afford the lawyers to sue them, or whatever. They paid someone else to do it instead, paying 1.5 or double the amount necessary (or more) even though they shouldn't have had to.

Here in the real world, it's all about options and choices.

Do you mean measuring the Colts footballs last? No evidence? They said they ran out of time when doing the Colts footballs. What does that suggest? That they did the Pats balls first, and THEN the Colts balls. Heck, "suggest" is too weak a word. What other possible conclusion could there be.

And bottom line is the Wells report should have included the timeline, and should have factored it in, or ELIMINATED IT, but they didn't.

First - short of Hamas, I'm almost certainly the most critical Cardinal fan on this board and I'm gonna guess anybody in the Cardinals thread would echo that. Fan? Yes. Homer? Get the **** outta here with that.

Second - as a fan of the team, I can actually speak intelligently to the background of some of the parties involved here - you cannot. If nothing else, Duncan's corroboration supports that point and he does have insider contacts that I do not. It provides a very feasible alternative motive for the Luhnow data hack. As the latter NYT article pointed out - why would they bother breaking into the system of the worst team in baseball who's data they already had if it wasn't expressly to spite Jeff Luhnow?

If you believe that there was a substantial competitive advantage gained here - please expound. The Cardinals almost certainly have the systems that Luhnow was incorporating at the time of the data breach. They have any of the information they would have been able to get. There's no new insight to be gleaned here had there been had they hacked any other team in baseball. This one particular GM simply had no new insight to offer them as he was running the Cardinals player procurement system for 5 years or so before he left.

There's no benefit to price enforcing on a team outside the division and again, if they used it to get a FA to sign with them, it could have only been Peralta - the only key FA signing they made in that time period. The only major trades they made were for guys like Mujica. The Astros, being in a complete rebuild, would not have been in on guys like Mujica and Peralta. They could have found out some intel on how other teams value their players but guess how else they could have found that out? Call the other teams. Those teams are going to be just as likely to feed misinformation to the Astros as they are the Cardinals. The only true 'trustworthy' intel would have been internal.

I also acknowledged that as the dust settles it could turn out that they did use this to their advantage in some instances, in which case I'll view it differently. However, right now, based on the timelines of the data leaked, this appears almost certainly to have occurred in the Spring of 2013 and maybe have impacted 2 drafts, no trades and no FA signings.

Explain how I'm being a homer here.

Had this been the Cubs, Dodgers, Yankees, Angels, D-Rays....literally ANY other team, then the motive would have been clearly competitive and the takeaway could have been far more substantial. It wasn't. My analysis is specific to this instance and the particular GM/System that was compromised. How is that hard to digest?

so the NFL really had a lot to gain by suspending the face of the league and docking the Patriots more picks and money for a cheating scandal that never existed

yeah man

totally

that is way more likely than ... THE PATRIOTS CHEATED. AGAIN.

way, way more likely

God you're dumb.

Did you see how they got in?

They literally used the list of his past passwords to access his system. Because of his experience with the Cards, they'd have probably been able to find whatever external server he housed in on pretty easily. This looks like they just logged into a cloud-based system.

This wouldn't be applicable to any other team. The only other possibility would be Oakland where their former director of scouting, Dan Kantrovitz, is now the assistant GM. I'm pretty sure Dan Kantrovitz isn't controlling Billy Beane's player procurement software.

No, they couldn't come up with any temperature coefficients that made sense with that scenario, so they had to invent a different one to try to fit their explanation into the data: there was a significant break in between measuring the last Patriot ball and the first Colt ball. The made up scenario states that the officials measured all of the Patriot balls, stopped measuring to re-inflate all of the Patriot balls, and then proceeded to measure all of the Colt balls. Basically, the first Colt ball should have warmed up just about the same amount as the last Patriot ball in any scenario other than this specific one, and the data does not support this.

Whoever leaked the initial hacking information a while back could have been upset that they were being forced to do it. It just as easily could have been orders from the higher ups just as it could have been a bit lower person going rogue.

One question: How many scouts did Luhnow take with him? I could see the value of having another team's scouting reports on prospects/players/advanced scouting/shift data/etc.

The only real value I could have seen the Cardinals gleaning from this hack is related to that type of scout info.

If that were the case, they'd have leaked that the Cardinals ordered it. If they were that upset, they'd have burned the house down. It's possible, sure, but "just as easily"...nah.

But here's the thing - the FBI has the house that the system was accessed from and they know the former Cardinals employee(s) that resided there at the time. They have the names and the names will come out.

There's not gonna be a hell of a lot that doesn't get found out here. If Mozeliak sanctioned it, heads will definitely roll and that sucks a great deal because Mozeliak was kicking some substantial ass well before Luhnow even left. Now I've always been of the mind that our best talent evaluater went out the door with Luhnow but Mozeliak is a damn shrewd GM in his own right. He's not as good at finding the hitters that Luhnow was, but he's developed a damn good system for pitching and has largely been aces in fishing/cutting bait on veteran players.

We have, at worst, a top 10 MLB GM in St. Louis and almost certainly a top 5 front office overall in terms of a common culture and organizational stability. If this petty horseshit from a schism that occurred a decade ago implodes that, it's going to be damn disappointing.

But if Moe sanctioned it, there's no alternative. In the end, I guess it would be karmic justice. The Cards do seem to have some Devilmagic that leads to their success. I have no idea how a squad with their 1 and 2 starters, 3 and 4 hitters and setup man (now closer as well) all injured has the best record in baseball by 4 games, especially with the worst manager at the helm I've ever seen. It makes no sense. But it would figure that something like this is what takes them down.

I'm not going to pretend to know much about Mike Matheny and his managing. I assume it would drive me about as crazy as Ned Yost and Ned Yost's bullpen management.

I will, however, point out that a manager, in the regular season, is basically +-2 wins for his team, tops.

The Cardinals were the same fan base that hated Tony LaRussa.