Revisiting Replacement Officials in the NFL

The go-to story for sportswriters in the first few weeks of the season was the use of replacement officials in the NFL. In the first week, when things appeared to be going well, a few of them trotted out the “they’re not so bad” line. By week two, however, there was solid consensus around the fact that things needed to change. After some further shenanigans in week three the NFL came around and settled with the real officials.

A couple weeks ago I took a look at how the replacements did. The conclusion: they were pretty much as bad as people said. They didn’t call a ton of extra penalties, but the increase was concentrated in some high-impact calls: Offensive Holding, Defensive Pass Interference, Defensive Holding and Personal Fouls. What better way to return from vacation than to circle back on this now that we have several weeks each of the replacements and the real officials.

Replacement Officials: They are that bad

Replacement officials in the NFL have been mildly controversial lately. From players to coaches to numerous columnists, it appears that the call for the real refs is universal.

Several of my usual reads have already analyzed various aspects of the situation. At advancednflstats.com, Brian Burke took a look at home field advantage and concluded that the numbers for this season are not conclusively different from the long-term trend. Bill Barnwell comes at it from more of an “integrity of the game” approach that a great number of columnists are favoring.

Are they really that bad?

Year	Avg Penalties per Week (1-3)
2005	237.3
2003	233.0
2004	218.33
2012	218.30
2010	208.7
2011	207.7
2002	203.0
2009	200.3
2008	191.3
2006	188.7
2007	182.0

Stats-wise, any time I see this kind of consensus opinion I want to look into it and see what’s up. Through three weeks, the replacement refs are averaging 218 penalty calls per week. This puts them comfortably in range of the past ten seasons when compared against the first three weeks of each. When compared against the full-season numbers, 2012 looks terrible with only 2004 and 2005 above 200. But this is because the replacements have so far participated only in 16 game weeks while full seasons have several weeks with 13 or 14 games to accommodate byes. Penalties per week also tend to go down slightly throughout the season even accounting for byes.

So if they aren’t calling more penalties, what is the problem? The 2012 season is seeing more penalties than 2011, about 0.5 extra calls per game, but that doesn’t seem like enough to cause this outcry.