Terry McAulay and Super Bowl XLIII (Cardinals-Steelers, February 2009): Part Three

Let's take a look more at Terry McAulay, the referee for Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers on February 1, 2009.

We know that he has a mixed crew for the Super Bowl, not his usual regular season crew with him, but let's focus on his regular season statistics even though that won't be his complete crew in the Super Bowl.

Teams with less penalty yards won most of the games. In the regular season, the team with less penalty yards accepted against it did extremely well.

Let's start with the raw numbers:

• Home teams had less penalty yards in 6 games and went 6-0 (76-43-1 for all refs).
• Visiting teams had less penalty yards in 9 games and went 5-4 (64-65 for all refs).
  
• Overall, the team with less penalty yards went 11-4 or 73.3%. (139-108-1 or 56.3% for all refs). I excluded the 5 games where the home and visiting teams had the same amount of penalty yards.

Let's look at correlations:

• The correlation to which team won was 0.684 (most for the 17 refs; it was only 0.098 for all refs)
• The correlation to the scoring margin was 0.408 (2nd most for the 17 refs; it was only 0.052 for all refs).

Teams with less number of penalties accepted won most of the games. In the regular season, the team with the less number of accepted penalties (ignoring the number of penalty yards) did very well.

Again, let's start with raw numbers:

• Home team with less penalties: 6-0 (100%). For all refs, 70-41-1 (62.9%)
  
• Visiting team with less penalties: 5-4 (55.6%). For all refs, 54-60 (47.4%)
  
• Overall the team with less penalties went 11-4 (73.3%). For all refs, 114-101-1 (50.7%)

Let's look at correlations:

• The correlation to which team won was 0.614 (most for the 17 refs). It was 0.136 for all refs.
  
• The correlation to the scoring margin was 0.362 (3rd most for the 17 refs). It was only 0.080 for all refs.

For these statistics, Terry McAulay seems overall to have the closest match between penalties called and the odds your team will lose. Roughly speaking, the referees following behind Terry McAulay are Tony Corrente and Gene Steratore. On the other side, the complete opposite of Terry McAulay was Jeff Triplette.

It's difficult to categorize, but the referee with roughly the least correlation between penalties (yards and number) and the game result (scoring margin and raw result) was Walt Coleman. Funny, Walt Coleman had the least number of penalties during the regular season.