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.

Why are NFL preseason win projections so bad?

I have been unable to avoid looking at predictions for the upcoming NFL season. After spending some time picking apart ESPN’s Future Power Rankings back in May, these predictions have again piqued my interest – so I will pick them apart too. When will they ever learn that I will go away if they pick the Browns to make the playoffs (I’m not even asking for a Super Bowl, just to make the playoffs and maybe also to have Pittsburgh not do well).

Projecting win totals is definitely hard. Brian Burke, the very talented founder of AdvancedNFLStats.com, has had a significant amount of fun deconstructing Football Outsiders’ projections over the years. Among other things, he has shown that the results could be improved by picking all teams to finish 8-8 (he refers to this as the CoMA strategy) and picking all teams to regress somewhat by projecting 6 wins plus ¼ of the prior year’s win total – 10-6 becomes 6 + 10/4 = 8.5 wins (he refers to this as the ‘Koko the Monkey’ strategy, fans of Seinfeld approve).

Preseason polls are worth exactly what you pay for them

It’s college football season again, and I am excited about the possibilities. Week one brings an excellent out-of-conference matchup between Alabama and Michigan played at a neutral site in Dallas that, according to preseason polls, features two of the top ten teams in the country. But are Alabama and Michigan really in the top ten, or are they coasting on their considerable reputations?

Methodology

In evaluating whether teams are properly rated, the first thing that comes to mind is to simply compare preseason and postseason polls. The difference in rankings would show up as a positive (underrated) or negative (overrated) change from preseason to postseason. The weakness with this method is that it treats all spots as the same. A team rated 20^th going into the season that finishes 24^th would be a -4, just like a team that rated 1^st going into the season and finished 5^th. To me, the second miss should be more significant because the gap between the 1^st and 5^th best team in the country should be much larger than that between the 20^th and 24^th best teams (think of the far right of a bell curve vs. the area closer to the middle). Because of the system that adds weight to movements at the top it will be extremely hard for a team to show up as overrated without being in the top portion of the polls, but that seems like a reasonable proposition as a team starting in the high teens cannot be considered highly rated. Now we just have to think about the best way to systematically account for errors in different ranges of the poll.

In a previous post, I used the average postseason Sagarin points to account for the varying differences between teams from the top (larger gaps) to the bottom of the poll (smaller gaps). While using votes for each team is another option, it relies on the polls themselves – which we are examining for flaws – rather than a reasonably reliable third party. The Sagarin rankings are postseason but, in theory, that’s what the preseason rankings are striving for. Check out the demonstration of the dropoff in points from 1 through 25 displayed nearby (this will help provide context for the numbers in the tables below). Now that we have a methodology, let’s put it to work.

It's gotta be the suits (world records in swimming)

Ryan Lochte is smiling, but what about everybody else?

I am suffering from a bit of Olympics withdrawal, and getting quite a bit of pressure from someone, so I thought would write one more thing about an Olympic sport before they go away for four years.

Setting a world record in swimming is extremely tough these days. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing the eight 100 meter events (Free, Back, Breast and Fly for men and women) saw six world records set – three in the Men’s 100 Free alone. By comparison the 2012 London games witnessed only two world records in the same set of events. Factor in the 4x100 relays (Medley and Free) and the 400 IM and Beijing gets an additional six records for a total of 12 while London sees only two more to bring the total to four.

Of course back in Beijing swimmers could wear full body suits made of polyurethane, reducing their drag relative to bare skin and providing buoyancy. In the summer of 2009, as swimmers were setting records by the poolfull (get it?) at the World Championships in Rome, swimming’s governing body banned the suits effective January 1^st 2010.

So what has all this done for the state of swimming world records? Were these suits responsible for the success or have swimmers found new ways to train that make those records achievable.

Why does China win so many gold medals?

With the Games of the XXX Olympiad fully underway in London, I thought I would turn myself towards some Olympic numbers. I fully intended to do a look at declining records for speed across sports (swimming, track and field, cycling and so on) and still might get to it, but I was intrigued by a different statistic before I could get that effort off the ground.

China has become a dominant player in the Cold War-era game of topping the Olympic medal table. Since their return to the games in 1984 after 32 years – China boycotted the Olympics between 1952 and 84 due to the presence of the Republic of China, known in the IOC since 1979 as Chinese Taipei – they have won 385 medals in seven Summer Olympics. This obscures somewhat their recent run of strong results with 221 of those medals having come in the last three games. What prompted further inquiry was not the volume, however, but the composition of the total.