Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Super Bowl: Bears, Colts, and Tony Corrente

So, the news is that the Chicago Bears-Indianapolis Colts game will be called by a specially composed all-star referee crew led by referee Tony Corrente. Two reasons the Super Bowl will not match up directly to Tony's regular season games: (1) there is no home team and (2) Tony will lead an all-star crew, not everyone else on his regular season crew.

Putting aside these major warning signs, let's play what-if and pretend Tony were calling the game with his usually regular-season crew (or perhaps if you think Tony can dictate his vision on the rest of the crew?):

Using regular-season DVOA, the Bears and Colts are pretty evenly matched (Bears 5% better DVOA), which was rare for Tony this year. In games where the teams were within 10% DVOA, the favored team went 1-1. Tony did 5% better for favorites than you'd ordinarily expect in the regular season, so that's a good sign for the Bears.

By season-wins, the Bears had one greater win. In the regular season, the team with one-greater win went 1-0.

As far as penalties called, Tony had the fifth-highest number of penalties per game (4th-highest when you adjust for strength of schedule).

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