Interesting. Almost as if there’s some other potential motivation in professional sports.
Would love to see college trend over time – that would be telling
Interested in seeing this by offense vs defense penalties
It’d be interesting to slice this based on point differential and time left in game. My hypothesis would be that NFL has more close games so players might be more likely to commit penalties on 3rd or 4th if it could change the outcome.
It is absurd how often I perceive that a team is bailed out on a 3rd/4th down, 5-yard, automatic first down illegal contact/defensive holding. Seeing charts like this seems to back up that perception a little bit. Can you chart the frequency of those calls (and DPI) by down (probably excluding running plays)? I’d be interested to see if my perception fits reality there.
Either way, I recommend the NFL decrease the severity of those penalties to not be an automatic first down to help mitigate the undue influence that referees have over the game. At least then, calling a penalty based on some small contact from a defender on a WR who was never targeted that also probably went uncalled on other earlier downs doesn’t give a free first down on a 3rd and 15 incompletion. I think just giving the offense a chance to re-do the down from 5 yards closer should be enough of an award and lets more of the game be determined on the field by the players and not the refs.
Makes sense that “passing downs” generate more penalties but would be curious to see Offensive vs Defensive penalties. Would assume Defense probably pretty skewed to 3rd/4th downs but offense may be flatter.
6 comments
Sources:
[https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mhixon/college-football-statistics](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mhixon/college-football-statistics)
[https://www.nflfastr.com/reference/index.html](https://www.nflfastr.com/reference/index.html)
Created via ggplot in Rstudio.
Interesting. Almost as if there’s some other potential motivation in professional sports.
Would love to see college trend over time – that would be telling
Interested in seeing this by offense vs defense penalties
It’d be interesting to slice this based on point differential and time left in game. My hypothesis would be that NFL has more close games so players might be more likely to commit penalties on 3rd or 4th if it could change the outcome.
It is absurd how often I perceive that a team is bailed out on a 3rd/4th down, 5-yard, automatic first down illegal contact/defensive holding. Seeing charts like this seems to back up that perception a little bit. Can you chart the frequency of those calls (and DPI) by down (probably excluding running plays)? I’d be interested to see if my perception fits reality there.
Either way, I recommend the NFL decrease the severity of those penalties to not be an automatic first down to help mitigate the undue influence that referees have over the game. At least then, calling a penalty based on some small contact from a defender on a WR who was never targeted that also probably went uncalled on other earlier downs doesn’t give a free first down on a 3rd and 15 incompletion. I think just giving the offense a chance to re-do the down from 5 yards closer should be enough of an award and lets more of the game be determined on the field by the players and not the refs.
Makes sense that “passing downs” generate more penalties but would be curious to see Offensive vs Defensive penalties. Would assume Defense probably pretty skewed to 3rd/4th downs but offense may be flatter.
Comments are closed.