Sunday, January 27, 2008

Super Bowl Giants-Patriots: Referee Statistics

In this post, we will take a look at the number of penalties called per game, total points per game, and the two teams' experience with the different parts of the Super Bowl crew. We track penalty statistics by the entire referee crew, not by the particular individual in that crew. So let us take a look at how the entire referee crew that each official was a part of did in the regular season:

Referee: Mike Carey (Carey)
Umpire: Tony Michalek (Parry)
Head linesman: Gary Slaughter (Leavy)
Line judge: Carl Johnson (Austin)
Field judge: Boris Cheek (Green)
Side judge: Larry Rose (Green)
Back judge: Scott Helverson (Hochuli)

By the way, there were 17 referee crews in the 2007 regular season.
Referee: (Carey) -- 9th in total penalties, 6th in total points, NE 2-0, NYG 0-1.
Umpire: (Parry) -- 7th in total penalties, 7th in total points, NE 1-0.
Head linesman: (Leavy) -- 6th in total penalties, 14th in total points, NYG 1-0.
Line judge: (Austin) -- 17th and last in total penalties, 5th in total points, NYG 1-0.
Field judge and side judge: (Green) -- 11th in total penalties, 4th in total points, NE 1-0.
Back judge: (Hochuli) -- 5th in total penalties, 3rd in total points, NE 1-0, NYG 0-1.

If you average all of the crew members equally, you'd come out with 11.2 penalties per game which would be 10th if it were a regular season crew. You'd come out with 44.7 total points per game, which would have been 7th.

In the 2007 regular season, New England had experience with 5 of the 7 officials (one of them twice) and the Giants had experience with 4 of the 7 officials. Advantage: New England Patriots.

Our next project if we get time will be to assign a rating for each referee crew about how good they were for favorites -- or whether there was a greater chance of upsets in their games. All we need to crunch these numbers is create a model to identify which team is the favorite and by how much, then to compare the game results and add up the season-long totals for each crew(!)

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