Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:25 am  

DrFeelgood wrote:

This is great - they play a lot more games in the US don't they? In baseball at least. Perhaps more squad rotation might affect this. Based on what you have presented (and without rigorous statistical analysis ) teams have a slight advantage playing at home then.

So many more games in baseball. The typical major league team will take about three weeks to play the number of games the typical British RL side does in a whole season. It's the gold standard for sports analytics because of the number of games there are, and how many individual events there are in game - each of which is tracked to the Nth degree. All but a few of the techniques I use originate there.

The NFL is the other end of the spectrum entirely. For all that they are now starting to admit the role of concussion and the structure of the sport in the enormous number of CTE cases there was always a reason for their long standing refusal to extend the length of their season.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:27 am  

To be fair though, if 56% of games result in a home win, then "even split" for the refs will be 56% as well. I would say that the correct range for refs is then 50-60%. Above 60% and below 50% would seem to be the refereeing outliers and needing further investigation

Great stuff btw

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:42 am  

That's a fair point. I think the moral of the story here though is if a set of supporters fancy themselves as the 18th man they have to give the referee hell at every opportunity.

tl;dr: all pile on

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 12:24 pm  

Impossible stats that I want:

How often do referees give decisions against the home team when the crowd gets on the referee's back?
What percentage of forward passes are given by the touch judge?

I'm sure people could add plenty more to this wishful thinking list!

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 12:37 pm  

I can do SL penalties since 2006. But only raw numbers, not the timing of them or where on the pitch. I do have time of scores for the same games so if I had the times for penalties given then I might be able to do something with respect to game situation when awarded.

It kind of pisses me off that this isn't available. I can get data for every single play in every single game for the whole history of the NFL. College football for thirty years. Twenty years of soccer too, the most state-less, data-free game there is.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 2:53 pm  

I forgot to mention before that I'm filtering out those refs who've done less than ten games in a league.

Same thing for Super League.



And with penalty data. Slight switch here in that the home / away columns refer to number of times those sides were penalised. Penalties conceded, not penalties 'won'. The final column is the number of penalties the away side concedes on average more than the home side with that referee.

Turns out the data only goes back to 2007, not '06.



Ganson comes out looking better than I imagined he would. Child too. That said, this is penalties only. Nothing here about missed errors, errors that did not happen, etc.

I've also changed my mind on Cobb. He's no longer fair minded. He now flicks himself off to drama.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 3:19 pm  

Probably impossible to monitor but I always seemed to think there was an evening up of penalty counts in matches. What used to get my goat was the fact that the opposition used to get penalties deep in our half (and thus giving the opposition good chances of putting points on the board) whilst our penalties where also deep in our own half and so only allowed us to move down the pitch.This cause many arguments of the ref being biased whilst the penalty count would look even.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 3:35 pm  

Yeah, without knowing location and general game situation at the time the raw numbers don't mean a huge amount. There is context to everything.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 6:35 pm  

rugbyreddog wrote:

Probably impossible to monitor but I always seemed to think there was an evening up of penalty counts in matches. What used to get my goat was the fact that the opposition used to get penalties deep in our half (and thus giving the opposition good chances of putting points on the board) whilst our penalties where also deep in our own half and so only allowed us to move down the pitch.This cause many arguments of the ref being biased whilst the penalty count would look even.

I have no doubt that it happens, but I also have no doubt of the reasons. The media, coaches and fans get on the backs of referees so much about penalty counts. Someone kicks off when they get caned in a penalty count, arguing that it means they have been unfairly treated, so the referees feel they need to try and make them even by giving the odd pointless one on your own 20m line for a marginal offside.

In truth, the penalty count doesn't need to be anywhere near even. It should reflect the discipline of the two sides in the game. The referee is there to give penalties when rules are broken, not to make sure both teams get the same amount. If a team gets caned 12-2 in a penalty count, it should be because they were indisciplined and the opposition weren't.

But while everyone is on the back of referees about one sided counts, you can half understand why they do it. They get enough crap as it is.

To me, a penalty count has never ever been an issue. I'm always much more concerned with inconsistent officiating and not giving the same for both sides. Short of getting a stopwatch out for holding down or a measuring tape for offsides, that's the sort of thing that can't be explained in stats though.

Re: Home and Away : Mon Apr 11, 2016 7:02 pm  

vbfg - have you ever thought of taking up a hobby? Or a job?