re: Evidence Strongly Suggesting Alabama Officiating Bias

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I performed a t test comparing the penalties called on LSU and Alabama during the regular season over the ten years from 2003 to 2012. I took the data of penalties each game from the official LSU and Alabama sites. Over this period each team played 118 games.

LSU's penalties per year goes like this: 89, 73, 74, 76, 76, 104, 74, 91, 67, 89.
Alabama's penalties per year: 48, 48, 63, 63, 48, 55, 70, 70, 66, 69.

LSU's average penalties per game is 6.8898.
Alabama's average penalties per game is 5.0847.

Using the t test comparing all the games, I get a p value of 0.0001! This means that there is certainly a difference between the penalties of these two teams. The important question is why?

I see two possible explanations.
1. Alabama is a more disciplined team. I find this to be highly unlikely as they would have to be more disciplined consistently of over a ten year period which included multiple different coaches on each team, including one coach who coached at both schools!
2. There is a bias for Alabama. This is much more likely. It would not take a conspiracy, just the subtle bias that is a result of the current structure of the SEC head offices. Also seems likely when we look at the other areas where Alabama seems to have created an advantage for itself.

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