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Your Big 12 Penalty Data Open Thread

YOU get some data and YOU get some data, EVERYBODY GETS SOME DATA

By Bitterwhiteguy
Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

The last few days of Longhorn Twitter, Longhorn Forums, and Longhorn Friendster have been filled with complaints about referees. The motives ascribed to the refs have ranged all over the map and - aside from Dagga's impressive post - most has been emotional speculation without much data to support it. I saw Brian Davis' tweet earlier this week, and it got me to thinking about the seeming lack of publicly available penalty info in the Big 12. I'm between projects at work and I happen to have an indefensible amount of free time this week, so I decided to start pulling together some useful data on penalties in the Big 12. ~1000 games and a metric ton of regret later, I came up with this spreadsheet for everyone to download.

Your Big 12 Penalty Data Spreadsheet

A few notes:

  1. The spreadsheet is correct to the best of my ability, considering most of it was entered by hand. Over 90% of the information came directly from the Big 12 website, with the backup source being the sites of individual Big 12 teams. I avoided ESPN & some other sites because the spot checking I did showed more variance than I was comfortable adding to the spreadsheet. Plus, this ostensibly means these are the same numbers the Big 12 HQ is using as part of their review of the refs.
  2. These are all games involving Big 12 teams, but not necessarily Big 12 refs. Bowl games & OOC games are two examples of games where Big 12 refs weren't necessarily involved.
  3. I have all the info I could find from the 2005 season until now, but I'd recommend you use the 2005 & 2006 tabs cautiously as the data on those fields was more sparse & varied in quality than other years. It seems like the Big 12 got its act together in the 2007 season.
  4. I intentionally didn't do much in terms of analysis; I'd rather leave the data mostly raw for people to dig into however they like. The red highlights are Excel highlighting the 'top 10%' values of each column, but beyond that there's not much I've done to it.

I hope people can take this data and come up with some useful info out of it. If you find anything interesting, please post it in the comments section.

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