Walt Anderson and the Philadelphia Eagles-Arizona Cardinals NFC Championship: Part One

A few message boards and blogs are suggesting that Walt Anderson might be the referee for the Eagles-Cardinals NFC championship game.

If that's the case, let's look at Walt Anderson's statistics for the full 2008 NFL season.  It's possible the NFL will assign a mixed crew for him, so maybe these statistics won't apply completely, but it's what we have so let's take a look at them even if we have to hedge a bit because his crew might be a little different.

In this post, we look at some basic statistics.  We'll look at more specific statistics in another blog posting soon.

Rankings are out of 17 referee crews

Penalties per game: 12.6 (3rd).  12.7 in 2007

Penalty yards: 96 (6th).  97 in 2007

Yards per penalty: 7.7 (13th).  7.6 in 2007

Percent penalties on visiting team: 52% (5th).  50% in 2007

Number of penalties on visiting team more than home team: 0.6 (4th).  0 in 2007

Total points: 41.2 (13th) 41.7 in 2007

Visitor points: 17.9 (17th and last).  20.3 in 2007

Home points: 23.4 (9th).  21.3 in 2007

Home win rate: 64% (4th), 60% (9th) in 2007

So visiting teams scored very little in Walt's games in 2008.  Generally he had lower-scoring games.  It wasn't due to the strength of the teams, either.  If you look at the overall scoring and defenses of the teams in Walt's 2008 games, they would have worked out to be equal for visiting teams and home teams.

More statistics and analysis to come later...