Saturday, February 06, 2010

Super Bowl Referees for Super Bowl XLIV (Saints-Colts)

We come to the Super Bowl and two difficulties in analyzing the referee crews.

First, it is an all-star mixture of officials who worked on different crews in the regular season. So we can't rely on the regular season data because they did not all work together and it is difficult to separate out what part of a crew's statistics depends on each crew member.

The breakdown is:
Referee: Scott Green
Umpire: Undrey Wash (Cheffers's crew)
Head Linesman: John McGrath (Corrente's crew)
Line Judge: Jeff Seeman (Steratore's crew)
Side Judge: Greg Meyer (Don Carey's crew)
Back Judge: Greg Steed (McAulay's crew)
Field Judge: Rob Vernatchi (Morelli's crew)

So, do we analyze this as if Scott Green will impose his will on the crew and check his statistics only? None of the crew members have worked together before, so it is a mixture of seven different crews. Should we average out those seven crews' regular season statistics?

The second difference is that there is no true home team in the Super Bowl. I think we throw out the statistics we have about how each crew treated the home team and visiting team in the regular season games. However, maybe the statistics about how they treated favorites and underdogs still is useful. For example, if underdogs did especially well with a referee in the regular season, maybe that referee calls games a little differently than most referees so that it is harder to predict the result, which would also be true in a Super Bowl.

Let's dig in to the statistics for Scott Green's regular season, even though he has different crew members in the Super Bowl...

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