I stopped reading and downvoted you when you started talking that fumble bullshit.
Professors Greg Matthews from UofC and Michael Lopez from Skidmore wrote a column debunking all of Sharp's junk science and shady methodology. Here's a couple of their main points:
Sharp counted fumbles on special teams plays such as punt returns and kickoff returns in his data. Kick returners like Brandon Tate and Wes Welker will have vastly inflated fumble rates simply because fumble rates on punt returns and kickoff returns are much higher than on regular plays. For example, Welker had six fumbles as a receiver and 18 as a kick and punt returner. Sharp counted all these as receiving fumbles after Welker left New England. (A study from Football Perspective suggests that the fumble rate on kickoff returns is 3.1%, while the fumble rate on punt returns is 3.5%. Another study, conducted by Advanced Football Analytics and covering a similar period, suggests that the fumble rate on all run and pass plays is 1.67%.)
A second reason special team fumbles screw up the analysis is that it makes the “touches per fumble” stat that Sharp calculated meaningless because he is mixing and matching data from disparate sets. For instance, Sharp considers Welker to have had 690 touches and 12 fumbles for New England, for 58 touches per fumble. However, all 690 touches were on plays from scrimmage (672 receptions, 18 rushes). Yet of those 12 fumbles, 6 were punt return fumbles. It would hardly be accurate to count “touches per fumble” unless Sharp added in the number of times Welker touched the ball on special teams.
Finally, in relation to Deflategate, it’s worth noting that special teams balls (the so-called K-balls) are handled completely differently and kept separate from the other game balls. The 12 K-balls are sealed in a special box, shipped by the manufacturer, and never handled by the teams prior to the game. Barring some truly nefarious deeds by the Patriots to fix the K-balls involving Jason Bourne-level machinations, any analysis of ball-handling statistics to see if the Patriots did something unusual with the game balls should focus exclusively on the game balls. In effect, Sharp used data involving K-balls to make a claim about non-K-balls. That’s not science.
Sharp's claim of an 88% increase is way off base. In reality it's more like 23%. His whole claim is bogus and relies on lies or half-truths to make its conclusion.