gulliver
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My apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, and equal apologies if this is deemed to be a conspiracy worthy of a Niners fan, but...
I read an interesting post about how the Seahawks’ opponents were faring in terms of penalties when they played the Seahawks, vs. that team’s normal average. This person had looked at a few games and felt things looked off, but didn’t look at the whole season so far. It was an interesting premise, so I did it myself.
Specifically, I looked at each Seahawks opponent through Week 8, and compared their season average (excluding vs. Seattle) to their game against us. It involved looking at 53 games and 7 opponents in all. I looked at opponents’ games before and after they played us. To calculate team averages, I appropriately excluded each team’s game vs. Seattle.
I suspect how you interpret the results will say a lot about your receptivity to the idea that we—or the reigning champs in general—are disproportionately scrutinized by league officials.
In any event, those results show that, on average:
The part we can’t control, and the more inexplicable part, is the fact that our opponents are either constantly playing great games against us penalty-wise, or they are under less scrutiny.
One possible explanation is the opponent getting up for the game and being more disciplined against the reigning champs, but that is hard to square with the fact that the pressure/excitement often leads to MORE mistakes, not less, particularly among the OL and DL who can get jumpy against a “big” opponent.
See the charts below and let me know if there are any questions about methodology etc.
P.S. I’ve posted this on more than one site—but in all cases, it’s me doing the posting.
I read an interesting post about how the Seahawks’ opponents were faring in terms of penalties when they played the Seahawks, vs. that team’s normal average. This person had looked at a few games and felt things looked off, but didn’t look at the whole season so far. It was an interesting premise, so I did it myself.
Specifically, I looked at each Seahawks opponent through Week 8, and compared their season average (excluding vs. Seattle) to their game against us. It involved looking at 53 games and 7 opponents in all. I looked at opponents’ games before and after they played us. To calculate team averages, I appropriately excluded each team’s game vs. Seattle.
I suspect how you interpret the results will say a lot about your receptivity to the idea that we—or the reigning champs in general—are disproportionately scrutinized by league officials.
In any event, those results show that, on average:
- Seahawks’ opponents had -26.2% fewer penalties when they played the Seahawks than when they played their other games
- They also had -33.0% fewer penalty yards when they played the Seahawks than when they played their other games
- Overall, 4 of 7 Seahawks opponents had fewer penalties against the Seahawks. 1 (San Diego) was the same as their average, and only 2 (Dallas & Green Bay) had worse-than-average penalties.
- Overall, 5 of 7 Seahawks opponents had fewer penalty yards against the Seahawks—often substantially so—than their team average. Only Green Bay and Dallas had worse penalty yardage than their average.
- Though Dallas is technically among the team(s) which performed worse than its average against us, it’s worth noting that it was still very close to their average (+/- 7.7%). Compare to our other games, where opponents typically netted significantly less penalties/yardage than their average
- In every game but one (GB), Seattle had more penalties than its opponents
- Seattle had as many or more penalty yards than every single one of its opponents.
The part we can’t control, and the more inexplicable part, is the fact that our opponents are either constantly playing great games against us penalty-wise, or they are under less scrutiny.
One possible explanation is the opponent getting up for the game and being more disciplined against the reigning champs, but that is hard to square with the fact that the pressure/excitement often leads to MORE mistakes, not less, particularly among the OL and DL who can get jumpy against a “big” opponent.
See the charts below and let me know if there are any questions about methodology etc.
P.S. I’ve posted this on more than one site—but in all cases, it’s me doing the posting.
