re: Penalties against us with Ritter vs without

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Didn't Ritter officiate the 9-6 game and the 2010 game in TS?

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That game was in bama.

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The deal with that game was that so much attention had been brought on him and his biases before the game that the national media had caught some wind of the rumblings of it. Ritter was very much aware of the focus on him

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So you're saying that because of the tiger rant, the national media and Tom Ritter were aware of the "bias" and decided to change, to appease the tiger rant. This is the only place on the internet that thinks Ritter is biased against lsu.

there are facts. if you choose to ignore them, that's on you

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You all sound very, very pathetic.

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See...this is the inherent problem with pointing out bias. To do so gives those on the side that benefits the opportunity to declare the accuser as being scared, which then forces some on the accusing side to back down.

None of that changes what is or is not happening though.

I'll ask...if there is bias (and Baloo's stats here regarding Ritter's crew and the time I spent a couple of hours listing the penalty stats comparing LSU to BAMA from 2000 to the present to show that the coach never matters and that BAMA has had fewer penalties each year)...should it not be pointed out?

Is LSU simply supposed to grin and bear it? In the SEC, why allow the governing organization to place LSU at a disadvantage in comparison to its greatest rival simply because to make a case regarding bias looks pathetic? Why allow BAMA to benefit from our lack of desire of being called scared? They're laughing all the way to Atlanta every year...

BAMA is good enough as is, they don;t need help and we shouldn't be so fast to be shamed into allowing it to continue. The entire SEC would benefit from forcing BAMA to release its strange hold on the SEC office. It's not BAMA and the rest of us...why act like it?

This was what I put together a couple of years ago. I think this is pretty telling. even when BAMA blew, they were less penalized. Even when the great Saban was at LSU, his "well disciplined" teams were more penalized than Mike fricking Shula's BAMA teams. The stats only went back to 2003, but does anyone really want to make a bet that they don;t look exactly the same going back further...?

A few years to point out:

2003...LSU is the 10th ranked team in the SEC in penalties.
2007...LSU is dead last at 12 in most penalties.
2011...LSU is 7th, but look at BAMA that year. At 3.8 per game, they were #1 by a ton and 3rd nationally.



FWIW, this disparity was the same the past two seasons as well...the stats are there. Doesn't matter who the coach is...it's always the same.

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Also, where does this Bama bias come from? He's from Texas, lives in Tennessee, and didn't attend college in the SEC.

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Bias, if deliberate, is money-based. Money would be payment for point shaving. Point shaving is about the point spread not the opponent.

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Is LSU simply supposed to grin and bear it? In the SEC, why allow the governing organization to place LSU at a disadvantage in comparison to its greatest rival simply because to make a case regarding bias looks pathetic? Why allow BAMA to benefit from our lack of desire of being called scared? They're laughing all the way to Atlanta every year...

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They are laughing all the way to the bank! At its essence, this is about the money.

Some people refuse to believe that business operates this way behind the scenes.

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They are laughing all the way to the bank! At its essence, this is about the money.

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No doubt that's a large part of it.

In poking around looking at all this stuff over the years, one of the things I found most fascinating were the "rules" in place for SEC officials. One of them was that an SEC official could not officiate a game that involved his alma mater. Sounds like a solid rule, right? But unwind that for a minute and see just how toothless that rule is.

First...the head of officials at the SEC is a BAMA grad. Sure...he's not officiating games, but he oversees the entire league's officials. No one feel a tad bit of unease about that? Would the reasonable folks over in Tuscaloosa be ok with an LSU alumnus running the officials? He might be an incredibly honest man...but there is far too much at stake to allow that kind of appearance of potential impropriety.

How many people posting in this thread are not LSU alumni? I'm not. I graduated from USL but am a life long LSU fan. If I was a qualified official, does anyone think it would be a good idea to allow me to officiate an LSU game? There seem to be more stringent rules on what a booster can do in terms of recruiting violations than there are in regards to officiating actual games.

There were no rules forbidding an official from officiating games involving schools at which family members have some association. It is rumors that Tom Ritter's daughter goes/went to BAMA but I've never seen that substantiated so I won't comment, other than to say that if she did it would not forbid him from officiating a game for them.

And of course...does anyone think that the only way an official could aid "their" team would be by actively officiating a game in which they are playing? Could a team not benefit from calls going against a team in their own division that help cause a loss and allow the preferred team to rise in the standings?

Truth is...I have no idea how much true biases exists in the SEC. I think there is plenty enough smoke to warrant a real look and for those school NOT located in the great state of Alabama to constantly be keeping a close eye on things. But the truth is, so long as conferences are allowed to run themselves, you'll almost ALWAYS have a couple of programs try and run roughshod over their conferences. You want to end this...end the ability of individual conferences to assign officials and make them paid employees of the NCAA and fly them around like the NFL does so that regional bias or team affiliation have little to no real effect.

Then we can be like NFL fans and dislike officials because we think they suck, and not because we think they suck AND are biased.