It began as an intriguing statistical correlation. It blew up into a national debate. Now it's a civil engineer's redemption song.

And it might also be evidence that make Tom Brady and the New England Patriots look even worse.

Back in January, after the deflate-gate story broke, a civil engineer named Warren Sharp put together some numbers that led him to a surprising finding: the Patriots are very, very good at holding onto the ball; and their ability to do so improved significantly after Brady and other quarterbacks pushed for a rule change allowing teams to provide their own footballs for games.

View photos LeGarrette Blount didn't have a fumble in eight games with the Pats last season. (AP) More

"Based upon the data we've collected and the probabilities, it definitely is extremely unlikely that their ability to hold onto the football would change so much and be as far away from the rest of the NFL," Sharp said back then. "It's extremely unlikely."

Sharp never leapt to the conclusion that the Pats' alleged deflation of footballs brought about their fumbling advantage – correlation doesn't mean causation – but many people took it that way. And several statisticians scoffed. After all, this guy runs a gambling site and suddenly he is some sort of stats wizard? One statistician called Sharp's work "98 percent bunk."

Sharp didn't expect to be vindicated.

"I didn't think they were going to find anything of merit that would implicate anybody," he said Thursday by phone, "or show potential proof of something in the past."

Then the Wells Report came out. And lo and behold, there was indeed evidence of something beyond one game against the Indianapolis Colts in bad January weather. This was likely more than just atmospheric conditions.

Whether there was something systemic that the Patriots were doing, with or without Brady's knowledge, is still not known and might never be known. But the fact that there was someone in the organization known as "The Deflator" indicates that there was a process to take air out of the ball.

That re-opened the door to the possibility that Sharp was onto something.

View photos (Reuters) More

"I think the much-maligned study by Warren Sharp about the Patriots having a low fumble rate should be taken more seriously, for sure," wrote Benjamin Morris of the stats site fivethirtyeight.com. "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."

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