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Message: [QUOTE="ToolzieFan, post: 3614617, member: 7018"] Here’s a passage from an excellent book that I’d recommend to any sports fan looking to read about subjects like this. [I]“We looked at calls requiring more or less referee judgment to see whether the home advantage was the same. Loose ball and offensive fouls seem to be the most ambiguous and contentious. Ted Bernhardt, a longtime NBA official, now retired, helped us with our analysis. “Blocking fouls versus charging fouls are by far the hardest calls to make,” he says. It turns out that offensive and loose ball fouls go the home team’s way at twice the rate of other personal fouls. We can also look at fouls that are more valuable, such as those that cause a change of possession. These fouls are almost four times more likely to go the home team’s way than fouls that don’t cause a change of possession. What about turnovers and violations? Turnovers from shot clock violations, which aren’t particularly ambiguous or controversial, are no different for home or away teams. Turnovers from five-second violations on inbounds plays, which are also fairly unambiguous because everyone can count (though referees may count a little slower or faster than everyone else and there is no clock indicating when five seconds has elapsed), are also not very different for home and away teams (in fact, home teams receive slightly more five-second violations). If, however, we look at the most ambiguous turnover calls requiring the most judgment, such as palming and traveling, we see huge differences in home and away numbers. The chance of a visiting player getting called for traveling is 15 percent higher than it is for a home team player. The fact that ambiguous fouls and turnovers tend to go the home team’s way and unambiguous ones don’t is hard to reconcile with sloppy play on the part of visiting teams. But it’s exactly what you would expect from referee bias.”[/I] — Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by L. Jon Wertheim, Tobias Moskowitz [URL unfurl="true"]https://a.co/eY7q1im[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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