Apparently Some Teams do get screwed by the refs more than other teams.

[HardyBoy]

Would also like to see something showing the % of games that each team plays that go into crunch time...bills over the last 8 years or so haven't had a lot of crunch time games and the only really close games they have are the ones they lose.

 

Would love to see the same stats when teams are on the verge of getting a game to be crunch time, but the bills score to get it to be a two score game or whatever they consider outside the range of the crunch time definition.

 

So this tells us potentially that bills do not enter close games that contain crunch time unless they are being penalized consistently during the game or in other key moments...but it doesn't tell us if they are bad calls or how many calls make up this number, where a few bad calls on a small sample size might not be representative enough of a sample...

 

Is crunch time based on only time or as I'm assuming, time and score? What are the number of crunch time plays per team over the span of the analysis? How many fouls are committed by team? 

[Matt_In_NH]

11 hours ago, MJS said:

What constitutes a close call?

Collinsworth tells you

[SF Bills Fan]

The down that the flag is thrown is important. The Chiefs getting flagged for holding on offense on 1st and ten and then their opponent getting flagged for a questionable Pop I that extends a crucial drive is a big difference. There are glad that are relatively inconsequential and then game changing flags.  I saw a YouTube video once and a neutral party analyzed this and the Chiefs do get the big calls that go their way. 

[Ayjent]

That graph is useless.  A more telling stat would be flags nullifying conversions on O/takeaways on D (1st Downs, Touchdowns,  2pt Conversions, FGs, interceptions, fumble recoveries) and flags awarding conversions, and then a subset of that data when the score is within 8 pts at any point in a game. 

 

Those are the calls that change games dramatically at any given stage of a game.  You could keep on going deeper into that analysis and break it down by obvious to questionable calls (which is more subjective).  I think that would uncover a much different narrative of who gets meaningful calls and who gets screwed.

 

This was always something that seemed very obvious to me when we would watch Brady era Pats games - they would get called for meaningless penalties late in a game that was decided or for clear false starts, and Offside on Defense.  The bottom line penalties wouldn't look too lopsided because of some of these calls, but the calls most definitely helped the Pats more than their opponents.

Edited October 2 by Ayjent

[finn]

I'm not statistician but even I know that a sample size has to be big enough for the data to validly capture reality. Give it a full year, and the distribution will likely regress to the mean with a few outliers. Give it five years, and there'll be a cluster in the middle. That's not to say some teams aren't getting shafted while others are being favored; it's just that it'll even out over time.

 

Except, of course, flags against the Chiefs, particularly anything involving the beatified Mahomes.  

[billsfan89]

There is some subjectivity to this data (what is a close call what is a missed call) but refs are humans and are subject to error, the ideal is to call a game consistently and not make any glaring mistakes. If a game is called consistently the Video reviews ensure that they have the tools to make calls they have often missed in the past so there's that the help the margins of error. One thing I think can help is making ruffing the passer a reviewable call so that egregious soft calls like the Robinson on Mahomes call can be adjudicated properly and corrected. There's always going to be bad penalty calls but you just hope refs call the game as consistently as possible. 

[Sammy Watkins' Rib]

11 hours ago, nedboy7 said:

It’s weird.  So the league or refs favor the Falcons and Bucs for some reason?  Agree on the Saints part. 

 

Well, their entire division including the Panthers is in the "close calls go your way" quadrant. I think we know which games the Saints are getting screwed in most often. 

[The Wiz]

 

 

[Mr. WEO]

15 hours ago, Mikie2times said:

It’s not nothing,  it not really something either. I think you need to have a baseline for total calls to see it more as a %. It would mean more to me if I knew team A has 50% of its calls associated with this time period vs just a number. Then you could probably model that to say if any teams are truly outside of a normal range you would expect. But just with this number I don’t know how much you can really say.

 

As others have pointed out, this graph says nothing about the validity of the calls, just that there are calls made in that timeframe at different frequencies for different teams. So it cannot possibly answer the question as to whether any team is "getting screwed".

[Goin Breakdown]

16 hours ago, Stads said:

When she's over a week late and you didn't use protection

So she's having a baby!?

[The Wiz]

And he broke it down for just January. 

 

 

 

[\GoBillsInDallas/]

20 hours ago, Chaos said:

Apparently Some Teams do get screwed by the refs more than other teams.

 

[boater]

On 10/1/2026 at 8:46 PM, Chaos said:

Do we think this is true, or just fake internet analysis

 

I don't know, but it does bring to mind this famous saying:

 

"70% of statistics are made up on the spot"

[Augie]

I don’t think you’ll get any argument from Sean McDermott.