From: nichols@spss.com (David Nichols)
Subject: Re: Excessive Celebration Penalty
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 17:08:33 GMT

Greg Sroka responded to my earlier post (my responses to him are inside
the dashed lines):

>I will say that the only team I've seen that even approaches Notre Dame
>in terms of consistency of referee favoritism is Penn State, but only when
>playing at home. Notre Dame gets referee blessings at home and on the road.
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I let it go once, but I won't keep silent after seeing you repeat this
silly, biased, non-factual statement. Why do you form such an opinion?
Do you watch every televised ND (or Penn State) game?  Or did you just
see the one's where you were rooting for ND's opponent, and they lost?
I've either attended or watched most ND games since 1981.  Believe me,
ND has been hurt by bad calls many times.

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Yes, it's so difficult for someone living in the midwest (Michigan for
well over a decade, Chicago for over 8 years) to get coverage of Notre
Dame. It isn't like Notre Dame had their own Chicago channel televising
virtually all of their games that weren't on major networks even before
NBC declared itself the Notre Dame network.

I've seen far more of Notre Dame than I care to. I like to watch them
play Penn State, sometimes Pittsburgh, or Miami or Alabama when they
were playing series, and of course Michigan and Michigan State (when
MSU can give them a game, which is occasional). Unfortunately, I've also
been faced with the choice of them vs. some patsy or nothing, which I
don't care to see, but sometimes watch just because I'm a football fan.
In sum, I've seen a lot of Notre Dame football.

Of course Notre Dame has been hurt by many bad calls. But they've also
been helped by many more. As I said in an earlier post, if anyone has
any systematic data that might reasonably be used to evaluate this
question, I'll be more than happy to analyze it.
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Since ND vs. USC is coming up, I should mention the most blatant bad
call I can remember. It happened in the Faust era.
ND was winning at USC late in the game, when 'SC was driving for a go
ahead TD. A USC ball carrier was hit inside the 5 but managed to get into
the endzone, and a ref signaled TD.  Meanwhile in the area where the hit
occurred, the ball sat on the ground, with an ND defender covering it.
The ball and runner went opposite directions due to the hit, and the ball
never crossed the goal line. But the ref didn't remember it that way, so
USC won the game. You don't ever forget calls like that.

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As an earlier person who objected to my statement said, citing your own
favorite times your team got screwed doesn't prove anything. My favorite
Notre Dame call was a defensive holding penalty on ND at their own 2 yd.
line AT Michigan State in 1978 that should have been an automatic first
down, but MSU only got third down over. They didn't score and lost by
5 points. Still, individual cases don't show patterns. Find me some
reasonable data and I'll show you what I'm talking about.
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In any case, these claims that team A benefits from referee favoritism
are absolutely ridiculous and unfounded. The quality and consistency of
play calling does seem to vary quite a bit, from ref to ref, from game to
game, week to week. But unless you're going to show proof, or talk about
specific situations, you've got to say that every team suffers and/or
benefits from bad calls about equally.  If anything, you'd think a ref
would be wary of favoring a highly visible team, and let too much go,
like tackling lineman by the neck.  But, why do you think they can
get away with it consistently, with everyone in the country watching?

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Notre Dame is a school of about 10000 students. They have stricter scholastic
requirements than all but a few division 1-A schools. Yet they manage to
field top flight football teams on a consistent basis. No one else among
similar schools even comes close.

Obviously, there must be something different about them. There is. They
have a mystique and an attraction unlike any other program. This affects
the referees and the pollsters. If you don't believe it, fine. I doubt
we'll be able to find sufficient data to determine the refereeing question
in any significant degree, but as I've said, I'll be glad to analyze such
data if anyone has it.

On the polling aspect of it though, I can find some information more easily
to show what I'm talking about. Notre Dame has had four undefeated, untied
seasons since they began systematically picking national champions back in
the late 1930s. They have been crowned national champions every time. In
each of those years, except 1988, there were other teams/was another team
also undefeated and untied. In EVERY case, Notre Dame was the national
champion. EVERY time. Can you find me another school in which this is
true? Notre Dame has also won partial or unanimous (as listed in the
NCAA book) national championships twice with a tie and three times with
a loss, all when there were teams with perfect records. Again, can you
find another team for which this is true?
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--
 David Nichols        Senior Statistical Support Specialist         SPSS, Inc.
 Phone: (312) 329-3684     Internet:  nichols@spss.com     Fax: (312) 329-3657
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 Any correlation between my views and those of SPSS is strictly due to chance.
Newsgroups: osu.sports,rec.sport.football.college