ACC Officiating Summary

Just a summary of past issues.  You can't discuss this issue with most as it becomes instantly emotional, but this facts below are of interest.

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/sports/college/fsu/football/2016/10/31/five-most-controversial-calls-florida-state-history/93063012/

Refs move the ball

During the 2011 Florida State-Wake Forest game, an ACC official moved the ball forward during a first down measurement. Wake Forest did not get the first down, it was still short, but the ACC came out and stated that the referee made a “clear mistake” after the game.

"The ball clearly moved and the ball is not supposed to move," a spokesman for the ACC said after the game.

"We have reprimanded and downgraded the referee."

Florida State went on to lose the game 35-30.

https://floridastate.rivals.com/news/study-shines-light-on-officiating-bias-in-acc-other-conferences

"There is evidence of ACC officiating favoritism towards teams that have been in the league longest (founded in 1953) and more frequently flagging teams that are newer to the conference: Georgia Tech (1978), Florida State (1991), University of Miami (2004), Virginia Tech (2004), and Boston College (2005). Current ACC members Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and Louisville were all added after the sample period ended in 2012."

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2016/12/there-may-be-incest-in-big-time-college.html

Great job by the FSU fan who did research on this (Brett).  I have known Brett online for many years.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-01/do-college-football-refs-have-it-in-for-your-team

"In the fourth quarter of the Oct. 29 football game between No. 3 Clemson and 12th-ranked Florida State, the Seminoles were thinking upset. FSU led 28-26 when star tailback Dalvin Cook ripped off a 50-yard run into Clemson territory.

Then came a penalty flag for an illegal block, negating the play. FSU Coach Jimbo Fisher stormed the sideline, screaming at the officials, dropping an apparent F-bomb. Then came another flag, for unsportsmanlike conduct. FSU punted. Clemson escaped with a 37-34 win.

Fisher resumed his tantrum at a postgame press conference, blasting the game’s officials as “gutless” and “wrong.” Eyes bulging, Fisher said, “You hold coaches accountable [and] players accountable—hold the damn officials accountable.” The Atlantic Coast Conference, which includes both FSU and Clemson, later fined Fisher $20,000.

Blaming the zebras is hardly novel. But Fisher’s tirade revived a question that has taken on greater significance in the era of lucrative college football playoffs: Do officials paid by the top NCAA conferences slant their calls—even if only unconsciously—to help their employers’ top teams? New research suggests the answer is yes.

Unlike in NCAA basketball, which draws referees from pools overseen by groups of conferences, most football referees are hired, trained, rewarded, and disciplined by individual conferences. That means officials are entrusted with making decisions that could hurt their employers—as with the call in the Clemson-FSU game. Clemson was the ACC team with the better shot at making the College Football Playoff and the financial bonanza it dangles.

“This is an incestuous situation,” says Rhett Brymer, a business management professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He spent more than a year parsing almost 39,000 fouls called in games involving NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision teams in the 2012-2015 seasons. His research finds “ample evidence of biases among conference officials,” including “conference officials showing partiality towards teams with the highest potential to generate revenue for their conference.”

It’s potentially a big deal now that the playoff has become such a rich source of cash for the Power 5 conferences that supply the teams: the Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12, Southeastern Conference, and ACC. Those conferences split about $275 million in bowl-season television money, and get paid an additional $6 million for each of their teams that qualify for the four-team playoff, plus $2.16 million for expenses. That’s on top of money for game tickets and merchandise, as well as the recruiting bump that can help schools return to the playoff year after year (see Alabama).

The Miami of Ohio research offers no evidence that specific officials intentionally skewed game outcomes. Nor does it assert that conferences would try to manipulate the part-time, independent contractors who officiate for $2,000 to $2,500 a game.

Brymer’s data suggest something more insidious. Across the 3,000-odd regular-season and bowl games he studied, a bit less than half of the fouls called were what he terms “discretionary”—holding, pass interference, unsportsmanlike conduct, and personal fouls like roughing the passer. Refs were on average 10 percent less likely to throw discretionary flags on teams that enjoy both strong playoff prospects and winning traditions. Brymer calls these teams “protected flagships.”

Protected flagships in the Big Ten did especially well with officials, the research shows. Ohio State, the conference’s most competitive flagship team in the years Brymer studied, was 14 percent less likely to be dinged for a discretionary foul than, say, Purdue, a non-flagship team with little chance of contending for a national title. The Buckeyes fared even better with refs in 2014, when it made the first-ever formal playoff and won the national championship on Jan. 12, 2015.

Rogers Redding, national coordinator for NCAA football officiating, says referees are human but unfailingly scrupulous. “I can unequivocally say that I have never seen any sign of bias on the part of officials at any level,” says Redding, who officiated NCAA football for 18 years.

While admitting “my bias is to be defensive about this,” Redding faults Brymer’s research for failing to account for whether the fouls analyzed were correctly called. “Some teams are just better” at avoiding penalties, he says. The study also doesn’t establish a baseline from which to judge variations in calls, Redding says. “What’s the expectation of the number of fouls that would be called in the absence of bias? We don’t know.”







NCAA refs undergo training year-round, from spring practice scrimmages to fortnightly videos prepared by Redding. “This is an avocation,” he says, with refs dreaming of being selected to work a bowl game or, the pinnacle, a national championship. Botching penalty calls can cost refs those opportunities—and their jobs. Spokespeople for the Power 5 conferences either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests.

Barry Mano, founder and president of the 22,000-member National Association of Sports Officials, wishes Brymer had included fouls like offsides and such decisions as ball spots. “Very few things in officiating aren’t discretionary,” he says. However, Mano concedes that officials could be susceptible to unconscious pressures and thinks it reasonable to consider moving refs out from under conference control. “The perception of our impartiality is important,” he says.

If one assumes zero bias on the part of on-field officials, Brymer says, his data should show greater consistency among calls. Instead, “where officials from some conferences are systematically calling it one way, other conference officials call it another way. Individual people and crews will have their own idiosyncratic ways of calling games. But this is more than that.” The refs are subject to the scrutiny of large organizations, he says, “which we in business all know is subject to money and power.”

As an assistant professor at Miami of Ohio’s Farmer School of Business, Brymer, 43, usually writes about such esoterica as the use of human capital in corporations. He grew up in Florida, and became a Florida State fan when he lived on the same block as legendary Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden. Brymer was in the stands for the 2003 “Swindle in the Swamp,” when ACC refs were pilloried for questionable calls that helped his team beat archrival Florida.

While earning his Ph.D. at Texas A&M, he came to sympathize with Aggie fans who believed that all close calls favored the University of Texas. “I reached a breaking point,” Brymer says. Weary of fans whining about refs without empirical evidence, he decided to see if he could find any. “At least I’m bringing myself peace,” he says.

Earlier research he presented at an MIT sports analytics conference drew criticism from the NCAA’s Redding. In an e-mail exchange, Redding told Brymer the study oversimplified things by merely using total penalty yards to gauge bias, without accounting for the different types of fouls called or other factors.

Seeking a more precise measuring stick, Brymer bought four years of data—38,871 penalties, including offsetting and declined calls—from SportSource Analytics, a firm that provides data to the committee that chooses the four playoff teams. Working with Miami business students Mickey Whitford and Michael Macey, he analyzed it against half a dozen variables, including home field, the Las Vegas betting line, and “game outcome uncertainty,” which discounts fouls called in blowouts while accounting for tight games in which refs might be reluctant to toss late flags.

Brymer accounted for officiating crews from different conferences and distinguished games between conference foes from those between teams from different conferences. (The away team’s conference usually provides the on-field officials.) He defined flagship teams as those with an all-time winning percentage above 60 percent and protected teams as those ranked highly in Associated Press polls.

The results show significant variations in penalty calls among conferences and seasons. Pac-12 officials showed the most erratic tendencies, swerving from favoring protected flagship teams in 2012-14 to punishing them in 2015. Playoff contenders lacking the flagship label—such as Wisconsin this year—often draw more subjective penalties than flagship teams, like Michigan, that also happen to generate healthy revenue.

Some of the study’s conclusions defy more-cynical views. For instance, teams favored by Vegas tended to get significantly more discretionary calls against them than underdogs. Ref-baiters might be distressed to learn that the SEC—winners of eight of the last 10 national titles—appears to have the least biased officials.

ACC refs actually worked against their top teams in 2012, with discretionary calls against them making up 56 percent of penalties, vs. 41 percent for less-competitive squads. The 56 percent dropped sharply over the next three years, during which two flagships—Clemson and Florida State—went undefeated through the ACC championship game. FSU won the national title after the 2013 regular season.

With a per-game average of about 13 penalties, the alleged bias might apply to only one or two fouls. But a single call or no-call can be disastrous, as Michigan State fans can painfully attest. Last year, the Spartans lost to Nebraska on a controversial touchdown pass to a receiver who stepped out of bounds—illegally, to MSU partisans—before the catch.


Brymer argues that the conferences should yield oversight of officials to an independent national body or regional pools, as with basketball. Redding says, “That’s a reasonable question to ask” but the conferences have worked hard to standardize officiating practices and “are happy with what they’ve got.” Retired Big Ten ref and current ESPN analyst Bill LeMonnier says it wouldn’t hurt to assign more third-conference officiating crews—a Pac-12 group for Alabama vs. Penn State, for instance—especially in big games. “If that eliminates the perception, it’s worth doing,” LeMonnier says.

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2015/01/proof-that-college-football-refs-are.html

"ACC refs, on the other hand, were flagged for favoring home teams, betting-line underdogs, and long-time conference members such as Duke and North Carolina."


"Perhaps the study’s oddest finding is that ACC refs may have hurt the conference’s strongest squads despite incentives to do the opposite. That might be due to the conference’s historical identification with basketball and the influence of its four founding North Carolina-based members: “Internal ACC power may be threatened by non-founding schools with strong football that drive much of its revenue," the paper notes. Nonfounders include Florida State, which won the NCAA football title last year.
After submitting the study for possible presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference next month, Brymer sat down and crunched officiating data for 2013-14. In those two years, Florida State’s championship happened to correspond with ACC refs halting their apparent favoritism of conference underdogs. “And strangely," Brymer says, "the SEC picked that bias up."


https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2015/01/proof-that-college-football-refs-are_22.html

Proof That College Football Refs Are Riddled With Bias


https://floridastate.rivals.com/showmsg.asp?SID=1061&fid=1959&style=2&tid=178086305&Page=2


TheBrickHouse

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Originally posted by towny1:
I'm not quite understanding, I read the findings to say the bias was up until 2012 and then reversed?

Posted from Rivals Mobile

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The original sample was 2005-2012, when the ACC showed bias. I did a separate analysis of 2013-2014, and the ACC showed no bias against favored teams."

Update:

Brick & Team's study has been reviewed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and earned a top 20 ranking out of the 500 examined by MIT.

For those keeping score at home, this is high recognition.

Here's to the Brickmiester  

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2016/12/worth-repeatingacc-officiating.html

The ACC has a history of working against it's football brands and for it's basketball brands.  But still expects the football brands to bring in the money.

Thankfully, it looks like the ACC is starting to figure it out (20 plus years too late though).


Lou Ciaccia ‏@louciaccia 19m19 minutes ago 

Cool read on officiating bias. bloomberg.com/news/features/… Absolutely buy this part. And if you can't call it straight, it's the right shiftpic.twitter.com/8Gh7cZWA5F

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2017/03/acc-officiating-and-late-hit-thoughts.html

Fisher made comments during the season expressing the same thought, especially after watching Francois being thrown around like a rag doll against Miami and Clemson during a three game stretch in October. Only three times last season were opposing defenses called for roughing the passer penalties over the course of the entire season.

The coach made it clear that he doesn’t think teams were intentionally trying to hit Francois late or injury his signal caller – while also saying he understands officials have a hard job. His goal apparently is to bring more attention to the potential safety dangers in both the ACC and across college football:

“…Just like they erred on the side of protection with hits down the field, you’ve got to do the same thing with quarterbacks. That’s the only way you’re going to get people off of them, in my opinion.”

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2016/06/ways-to-improve-acc-update.html

2. Overhaul the ACC officiating crew


" Last year, Warchant.com published a story documenting officiating bias in the ACC based on an independent research project. Not surprisingly, the study showed underdogs tended to receive preferential treatment in the ACC. Again, this is consistent with the bizarre disparity in holding calls involving Florida State. But what makes no sense is the trend is exactly the opposite when it comes to men’s basketball. Basketball powers Duke and North Carolina frequently lead the conference in free-throw disparity, and many believe that the conference officials bend over backwards to protect the premier basketball programs."

https://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2016/10/acc-illegal-block.html

ACC "Illegal Block"

Dear ACC.......go straight to hell with your refusal to fix officiating.

http://allthingsfsu.blogspot.com/2018/12/acc-football-officiating.html

During the Boston College game, the officials picked up a holding penalty which raised some eyebrows.

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It’s not like ACC officiating has a good reputation. Heck there’s even an academic study published by former poster Brickhouse (can’t tag):
https://floridastate.rivals.com/news/study-shines-light-on-officiating-bias-in-acc-other-conferences

There was also some stats floating around that the ACC never calls holding on teams playing against FSU.

I took a look (data-nerd-out in a spoiler at the bottom, TL/DL my numbers aren't perfect) and there seems to be a bias with holding calls against FSU, Pitt, & NC State while UNC benefits the most in the conference. This doesn't include special teams plays.

This is a graph of the total holding calls benefiting the team's defense minus the holding calls against their offense in ACC games. The table below is where the numbers come from. Make whatever conclusions you want, but I think there's a pattern here.

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Bonus:

• UNC only gets one holding call against them per season during ACC play since 2014. Seems a bit like a quota to me
• NC State is on par with FSU for being screwed over by holding calls. My tinfoil hat theory is that they are odd-program-out from the Tobacco Road schools. Pitt also may take the crown. Shame on them for playing in a division with UNC and Duke.
• The ACC tried their best to stop Pitt from going to the championship game with 12 holding calls against them. Sweet baby Jameis
• @ACCRefsSuck is no more?!
• I also looked at holding calls per play since, ostensibly, the more offensive plays you run then the more likely you'd get called for holding, but the same patterns emerged.
• Can you tell that the ACC really wanted to get Wake Forest bowl eligible this year?

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/sports/college/fsu/football/2018/10/15/blog-acc-protects-its-officials-more-than-its-integrity/1648708002/

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that's watched FSU football over the last 20 years when the ACC officials struggle to make the correct calls during games.

That's just a fact of life at this point.

But it's an entirely different point when the ACC home office goes along with it. 

That's what seems to have happened after FSU coach Willie Taggart disputed the illegal forward pass penalty that cost the Seminoles a touchdown in the 28-27 loss to Miami. 

FSU quarterback Deondre Francois releases the ball at the 44 1/2-yard line and wide receiver D.J. Matthews catches the ball just inside the 45.

At worst it's a parallel pass, which is still a lateral and a legal play. 

It would have put the Seminoles up 34-21 with 14 minutes remaining in the game. The drive ended with a missed field goal and FSU didn't cross the 50-yard line again.

NoleGIFs@NoleGIFs

So close...#FSUvsUM

37

5:57 PM - Oct 6, 2018

27 people are talking about this

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The play was closer than it should have been and it was a tough call by the officials on the field, but that's where instant replay is supposed to come into play.

That's where the replay booth is supposed to call down to the field so that there's extra time to go over the play in detail. 

None of that happened.

But the more disturbing part of all of this is that the ACC office cares more about protecting its officials than it does correcting their mistakes. 

It's an issue that they were unwilling to admit the crew was wrong because they would have to admit the officials got it wrong on the field and in the booth.

It's an issue because this continues to happen and nothing is done about it.

Because no one at the ACC office cares about the league's integrity, or at least that's the way it seems.

NoleSports.com editor Corey Clark explains why he decided to research 20 years of ACC officiating, with an emphasis on Florida State games, and what it tells us.

When the Big 12 rumors started swirling around Tallahassee earlier this year, I heard from a number of Florida State fans who were not only intrigued, but flat-out insistent that the Seminoles make the move. It wasn’t because Manhattan, Kan., or Waco, Texas, or Stillwater, Okla., are wonderful places to visit – although I’ve heard they are quite picturesque when the sun glistens off the tumbleweed just right – but because they wanted out of the ACC. Period. Now that’s likely not going to happen anytime soon with Wednesday’s Notre Dame news. But when I talked to FSU fans and asked them why they were in such a rush to bolt to a conference halfway across the country, their answers always involved ACC officiating. Yes, some people brought up the extra money for the university or the fact that it would be in a more football-oriented conference, but practically everyone brought up the ACC refs. It’s been a running complaint among Florida State fans for years. Of course, it’s been a running complaint with every fan base in every conference since the dawn of time. So, naturally, outsiders observe the incessant complaints with a jaundiced eye. But as someone once said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” After all, it was only last year that Florida State fans watched in shock as an ACC official was caught on film scooting the ball up for a measurement; another wrongly ruled a fair catch when Greg Reid pointed at the football (perhaps eliminating a touchdown); and yet another ejected Nigel Bradham for what was later viewed to be a clean hit. Three extraordinary rulings. In a span of six weeks. So with that as the backdrop, and with the 20th anniversary of FSU’s first ACC game taking place this Saturday, the Democrat decided to look back at the last two decades and see if Seminole fans really had a legitimate complaint. Was Florida State, in fact, treated differently, judged harsher, penalized more than their conference foes? After poring over hundreds of game books and box scores, the answer, in my mind, wasn’t just yes. It was a resounding, ‘Wow.’ Here’s how we broke down the research. It was simple, really. We focused on one category and one category only: Offensive holding. The reason for this was three-fold. One: It’s probably the single biggest complaint among FSU fans in regards to the officials – that they “blatantly ignore” obvious holding calls by Florida State opponents. Two: It’s a penalty that should, in theory, be a gauge of how talented a team is on the offensive and defensive lines. For instance, if you have a roster loaded with future NFL draft picks on the defensive front, it’s likely you’ll be held more than a team that runs out a couple of plodding Clydesdales to defensive end. Three: It’s the easiest of the subjective penalties (like pass interference and personal fouls) to track and find trends. Because, in actuality, it’s not supposed to be subjective. A hold is a hold is a hold. No matter if it’s against Bjoern Werner or whoever Maryland’s defensive end is. If an official sees a defensive linemen getting spun around or tackled – or worse – the yellow hanky is supposed to come out. There isn’t supposed to be a lot of gray area. So, with that in mind, I went down two paths with my research. First, I went through every conference game that was played from the first year of the ACC's expansion in 2005 until the regular-season finales of 2011. Seven full seasons. Every single game. And I charted every offensive hold that was called – even if it was declined. Some info from that research? Well. Florida State – as many of you could probably guess – has been called for the most holds in ACC games during that span with 83. North Carolina State is last with 40. If my math is correct here, that would mean FSU has been called for more than TWICE as many holds as N.C. State since 2005. And in the last five games between the two schools, FSU has been called for 17 holds and N.C. State has been called for three. That’s just odd. Now for all we know, these penalties were 100 percent legitimate. There’s a chance FSU did really hold 17 times and N.C. State really did hold just three. But anyone would admit that’s a striking disparity. What surprised me more than maybe anything else in the research was that since 2005 Duke’s defense has drawn more holds than Florida State. And Virginia Tech. And Miami. Think about that. Duke, which sends a defensive lineman to the NFL at about the same rate that Oprah runs marathons, has drawn more holding calls on the opposition than the NFL factories in Blacksburg, Tallahassee and Miami. In fact, FSU, Va Tech and Miami are three of the bottom five teams in the league for holds drawn since 2005. Which, in my mind, is akin to the North Carolina and Duke basketball teams being near the bottom of the ACC in free throws attempted. It wouldn’t make sense, right? Because the better you are, the harder you are to guard. And the harder you are to guard, the more you are fouled. By any measure, FSU’s defensive ends are harder to block than Duke’s. So anyway. Comparing FSU to the other ACC teams was Part 1 of the research. Part 2 was simply tracking every conference game the Seminoles have played in, dating all the way back to when the Seminoles opened up with Duke in 1992. Just to see if the holding calls were equitable, to see if perhaps it all evened out over the course of 160 games. Yeah, sure, maybe FSU gets called for more holds than anyone in the league, but with those dominating defenses of the 1990s surely they drew a ton of holding calls as well. Or not. Just so you know, all of this research was published in a story in Thursday’s paper, but I’ll offer this as an indication of just what kind of numbers we found: Not only has FSU been called for 79 more holds than it has drawn since joining the ACC, according to our research, but the 1997 defense, which included No. 3 overall pick Andre Wadsworth, drew three holds total in eight conference games. That defense featured an astonishing six defensive linemen that were drafted in the NFL and seemed to make a weekly habit of knocking opposing quarterbacks out of the game. It drew three holds. The 2003 and 2005 defenses, which also featured numerous NFL draft picks, drew four. Total. So how to explain this? Did the opposing offensive linemen in 1997 just not like their quarterbacks? Instead of blocking or clutching or grabbing did they simply say, “Here you go, Andre. Blindside him!” Were the ACC offensive lines in 2003 so good that the likes of Darnell Dockett and Travis Johnson were easily blocked? Just a ho-hum day at the office for those guards? Not likely. But it’s a theory. I’ll be honest. I had no idea what I would find when we started this project. Truly. I knew of the fan complaints. And I had written a blog in late 2010 noting that FSU’s defense – despite leading the nation in sacks – had only drawn five holding calls in six ACC games (an average of one every 83 plays from scrimmage). Ironically, FSU drew four over the next two games to finish the year with nine altogether – or three times as many as the 1997 defense. Over the course of 20 years, though, I figured it would be pretty even. That the numbers of holds called against the FSU offense would be about the same as the number of calls drawn by the FSU defense.

But the research said otherwise, and lends itself to a theory that has long been floating around the Florida State program. That when the Seminoles first joined the league in 1992 they were such a dominant force that the officials actually (and in many cases, rightly) felt sorry for their opponents. Those ACC teams couldn’t block those FSU defensive ends if they were allowed to have 10 linemen on the field, so the referees let some things slide. After all, don’t they say you could call a hold on every single play?

 Well, imagine those 1990s FSU defenses against the likes of Duke and Maryland. If the referees called a hold every time Peter Boulware’s shirt was grabbed, they’d still be playing the 1996 season. So maybe the officials did just feel sorry for those poor offensive tackles. And perhaps that subconscious human reaction has persisted, at least in part, for two decades?

Even as the talent gap between FSU and the rest of the league shrunk dramatically. Perhaps there’s an element in many of these referees, no matter how small, that thinks Wadsworth and Wilson and Werner should be able to get to the quarterback whether they’re held or not.

 Or … perhaps there’s another reason as to why Duke’s un-drafted defenders have drawn more holds than FSU defenses loaded with future pros?

Perhaps you can come up with your own theory.


https://www.floridatoday.com/story/sports/college/florida-state-university/2016/10/30/fsu-football-coach-fined/93031026/