NFL Referees 2009 And How The Underdogs Did With Them

One way to look at how normally a referee crew calls a game is to see whether home teams did extremely well when they were mega-favorites, somewhat well when they were slight favorites, poorly when they were slight-underdogs, and really badly when they were mega-underdogs. If the distribution of results has little correlation to the betting line, then it might be an indication that the referee crew calls games differently than most, so that the results are not that predictable. We looked at this in a recent posting.

A different way to look at how normally a referee crew calls a game is to see how well the favorites did, either as a raw won-loss percentage or against the spread. This approach ignores whether the home team performed easily or barely won (or beat the spread). It also ignores trying to find a correlation between the performance and by how much the team was a favorite.

Top and bottom referees for favorites' won-loss record in the 2009 regular season:
1. John Parry and Jeff Triplette (87%)
3. Don Carey and Bill Leavy (80%)
...
13. Carl Cheffers, Pete Morelli, Alberto Riveron, Gene Steratore (60%)
17. Jerome Boger (53%)
[The overall average was 69.5%, by the way.]

And the top and bottom for favorites against the spread:
1. Don Carey (80%)
2. John Parry (77%)
3. Bill Leavy, Walt Coleman, Ron Winter (60%)
...
13. Scott Green (38%)
14. Mike Carey and Terry McAulay (37%)
16. Ed Hochuli and Tony Corrente (33%)
[The overall average was 49.4%]

Scott Green is the referee for Super Bowl XLIV, the 2010 Super Bowl between the Colts and the Saints. How does he stack up (putting aside how he has an all-star crew rather than his regular crew)?

Favorites went 69% as a won-loss record, so he was 8th out of 17, or slightly good for favorites. This is right on the overall average of 69% for the year for all refs.

Favorites against the spread went 38%, so he was 13th out of 17th. Not good for favorites. This was way below the overall average of 49% for the year for all refs.

So a basic way to look at it would be to say the favorites (the Colts) have a 69% chance of winning and a 38% or 49% chance against the spread, depending on whether you focus on the season-long trend or Scott Green's trend.

But let's look at games where the betting line was 4-5 points. This will weed out games where there was an overwhelming favorite or one where the teams were virtually equal. For all referees, the favorites in those games went 56% as a won-loss rate and 48% against the spread. Not that favorable for the Colts.

As for Scott Green's regular season games, the results for the favorites W-L and ATS were: favored by 3 (0-1 W-L, 0-1 ATS), 3.5 (2-1 W-L, 2-1 ATS), 4.5 (1-0 W-L, 0-1 ATS), 5.5 (1-0 W-L, 1-0 ATS), 6 (3-0 W-L, 1-1-1 ATS). So when the point spread was between 3 and 6, favorites in Scott Green's games went 7-2 W-L and 4-4-1 ATS.