[BucEyedPea]

I forgot this one.

Your Guide To Deflate-gate/Ballghazi-Related Statistical Analyses

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/y...ical-analyses/

The gist of the posts, written by a tout named Warren Sharp, is that the Patriots are a phenomenal statistical outlier when it comes to hanging onto the ball....

The data science community responded with a number of rebuttals (I put together a roundup of my favorite ones below). Collectively, these posts did a great job of breaking down the Statistics 101 problems with Sharp’s original analyses. But even if Sharp had been less sloppy, it would have been right to take issue with the larger implication of his work — that any major outlier, if shown to be statistically significant, should be seen as evidence of rule-breaking....

The harshest counterargument belonged to data scientist Drew Fustin. Fustin challenged Sharp’s choice to exclude dome teams (Sharp’s own post says outdoor teams barely fumble more often than those based in domes), instead looking at fumble rates across all teams in outdoor games only — whereupon the Patriots don’t even rank first in the NFL at fumble avoidance over the 2010-2014 period. He also questions whether Sharp’s decision to use that 2010-14 period was a case of cherry-picking the timeframe that would make the Patriots look most like an extreme outlier.