deadspin attacks exponent's "science"

http://regressing.deadspin.com/the-nfls-dumbass-science-report-is-a-feature-not-a-bug-1722289874

What we’re looking at, in the absence of red-handed guilt, is the NFL, its investigatory arm, and that arm’s hired experts railroading an investigation with shoddy, biased works of bad science, and then holding up their homework to Roger Goodell, who sticks a gold star on it and calls it “highly credible.”

Jason Cohen has a PhD in Applied Probability and Statistics from Cornell University

A terrific takedown of Exponent's sleight of hand and then Wells quoting their report out of context. What weasels!

As underhanded as the false PSI leaks by the NFL Front office goons.

All this deflate crap brings me back to my youth ... growing up in RI. We played basketball year round on a hoop mounted on a telephone pole on our street. Except for when there was snow on the ground ... we had no idea of the IGL ... but we did know we had to put more air in the ball in the cold and take it out when it was warm. Same for the football and soccer ball .... it was done without much thought really. We knew the game was better with proper inflation ... easy.

So when I hear these idiots speak ... I wonder did they not play outside when they were kids???

It's like revenge of the nerds ...........

This is a great article and the quote you highlighted should be part of EVERY argument we make to doubters, haters, and non-believers.

There IS one question that I'd really like the media to follow up on. It seems like its common knowledge that Well first went to Columbia University for some help in understanding the science behind deflation. I'd like to know what happened in those meetings and why he subsequently went to Exponent.

patfanken said:

This is a great article and the quote you highlighted should be part of EVERY argument we make to doubters, haters, and non-believers.

There IS one question that I'd really like the media to follow up on. It seems like its common knowledge that Well first went to Columbia University for some help in understanding the science behind deflation. I'd like to know what happened in those meetings and why he subsequently went to Exponent.

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Supposedly Columbia referred them to exponent, alum work there or something

juny said:

Supposedly Columbia referred them to exponent, alum work there or something

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Obviously they still need extra cash to pay off that Columbia education

patfanken said:

This is a great article and the quote you highlighted should be part of EVERY argument we make to doubters, haters, and non-believers.

There IS one question that I'd really like the media to follow up on. It seems like its common knowledge that Well first went to Columbia University for some help in understanding the science behind deflation. I'd like to know what happened in those meetings and why he subsequently went to Exponent.

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The official story from Wells is that he was upset when he approached them confidentially and his contact was leaked to the media, and so he knew he could not trust them to keep information confidential and refused to work with them (which should have disqualified him from working with Pash and Vincent and the rest of the league office as well, if you think about it -- god forbid the correct PSI numbers get out to the press where the public might learn that they are entirely explained by ideal gas law right? ). He says he was referred to Exponent by one of the Columbia faculty. He also considered performing experiments at Princeton instead, but Prof. Marlowe said that they could not guarantee confidentiality to the standard that he required.

My guess is that he wanted sufficient confidentiality to maintain tight control over the reporting of results and did not want anyone to be able to find out about preliminary reports so that they could have multiple iterations of massaging the results and wording of drafts until they could privately come up with a final report that would fit the conclusion that he needed.

Determining the absolute theoretical pressures for the footballs is a much more complicated problem because the absolute pressure value depends on many unknown assumptions involving time, temperature, wetness and gauge usage. Exponent reproduces numbers consistent with the Patriots measurements, but only with assumptions they feel are unlikely. This conclusion is not presented in a statistical framework and there is no probability or statistical significance associated with this conclusion. They simply provide plots and say the Patriots measurements are unlikely, they guess, basically.

No one has been discussing this part of the Exponent report because it involves non-statistical hand waving and the conclusion is extremely weak.

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^^