Refs show bias towards Bama? - There might be something to it.....

Complaints that the refs show favoritism to certain teams (especially a certain team in crimson) have long been a staple on the rant. Although I've always scoffed at such complaints, research shows that there might be evidence that they are not just sour grapes (although the article states that SEC officials might be the least biased among Power 5 conferences). Anyway....it's an interesting read.

quote:

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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.”

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LINK