Home field advantage and biased officiating

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This worries me more than whether Justin Smith is going to play this week. I hope we lead by 40 at the half so as to take the officials out of the game.

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Originally posted by CitizenDan:
How did we make it all the way to almost Tuesday afternoon before blaming the refs for a loss that hasn't happened yet?

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Originally posted by bubbleboy789:
i suppose it makes sense. but i'd like to believe an NFL referee who is being paid extra to officiate a divisional playoff game would have a little more integrity than that.

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Originally posted by ChilliJon:
It's SF in January. I'm more concerned the playing surface could be a green painted dirt mess or under 2" of water.

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Professor Tobias Moskowitz Investigates Sports Adages
chicagobooth.edu

Uncovering referee bias
While officials may be tipping games toward the home team, the bias isn't intentional, said Moskowitz.

"We don't think this is conscious," said Moskowitz, who built on previous studies of soccer referee bias to uncover the connection to home field advantage. The cause, he says, is physchological, and in particular, related to social conformity.

"Basically, what's happening is referees start to see things the home crowd's way," Moskowitz explained.

In high-stakes game situations before making a split-second decision, referees seek both information from fans—and their approval. Referee bias becomes more evident, Moskowitz said, as the calls become more ambiguous—borderline strikes in baseball, for instance—and as crowds become more animated and opinionated.

Fear of blowing a call can cause referees to look for ways to "relieve some of that presure," Moskowitz said, "of having 50,000 screaming fans yell at you."

And the calls affect the scoreboard. In baseball, Moskowitz examined the strikezone and estimated that visiting teams receive 516 more strikeouts and are issued 195 fewer walks from home plate umpires over the course of a season.

"If you add up how much this is worth in terms of runs scored and everything else, that can explain a sizeable chunk of the home field advantage in baseball," said Moskowitz. "And, the same is true in other sports."

The behavior demonstrated in referee bias isn't restricted to sports, either.

"The idea of social conformity applies to a lot of settings," said Moskowitz. "It's one of the reasons, for instance, why mutual funds and analysts tend to herd and make some of the same recommendations."

Debunking the home field advantage myths
Before reaching their conclusions on referee bias, Moskowitz and Wertheim looked for evidence supporting the popular rationale on home field advantage.

They examined four possible explanations often espoused by broadcaster and fantasy league pundits and treated each one as a separate hypothesis. They mined data for isolated game events that could serve as a potential cause behind each effect in order to determine its bearing on home field advantage.

One way the authors disproved the influence of crowd support was studying basketball players' performance from the free-throw line. They found professionals sink 75.9 percent of their free throws whether lining up for the shot at home or on the road.

"We can't look at every situation, obviously, but if we find that crowd support doesn't have any effect on players in these isolated situations, it certainly questions how much of an effect they have in general on players," Moskowitz said.

Other conventional reasons—travel fatigue of visiting players or home team familiarity with the stadium—likewise were unsupported by game data.

"It doesn't mean that it's not there," said Moskowitz of the influence of drafting football players who thrive in cold-weather conditions or stacking a baseball lineup to suit a hitter-friendly ballpark. "It just may be a small effect and hard to detect in the data."

"You can't really disagree with data," said Evening MBA Program student Scott McIntosh after the presentation. Still, he was surprised by the evidence behind home field advantage.

Lindsay Brehm, '09, noted the application of business models to solve sports questions. "Even referees are subject to the regimens and influences we learn about in school," she said.
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