Hold On

September 18, 2019

By Noone from Tampa

Hello Hog Sty peeps! I will be writing a new feature that focuses on penalties and their impact on the game results. Why look at penalties? Because after turnovers, penalties are a leading cause of killing offensive drives or extending the drives of opponents.

Since the new season is still very young, I want to first take a look at the 2018 season and focus on offensive holding calls. I will look at the gross number of holding calls, without regard to whether they were accepted or declined.

Many of you think that the Redskins get called for offensive holding more than other teams in the NFL.

Well… would you care to guess who led the league in offensive holding calls in 2018? If you said the Redskins you would be half correct. The Redskins and Colts led the league with 32 holding calls, although the Colts did it through the 18 games they played, while the Redskins did it in 16 games.

The overall league average was about 23 holding calls for the season or around 1.4 per game. The Redskins averaged 2 per game.

To look at the other side of the coin, that is, which team had the fewest offensive holding calls against their opponents, if you guessed that it’s the Redskins, you would be 100% correct. Washington benefited from 14 holding calls against opposing offenses. This means the Redskins had a net difference in holding calls of -18, or 18 more calls against us than against our opponents. Let’s take a look at that graphically across the entire league.

What can we infer from this graph? Bad teams (Oakland, San Francisco) don’t necessarily benefit from having a favorable net difference and good teams (Kansas City, New Orleans) can overcome a bad net difference.

The correlation coefficient is used in statistics to determine the likelihood of statistical relationship between two variables. A value close to zero indicates no correlation, while a value close to one or negative one indicates a high degree of correlation.  The correlation coefficient between net holding calls and wins is -0.01882, which indicates little to no correlation.

So, while we can complain and rail against the officials for the unfavorable distribution of holding calls either for or against the Redskins, the truth is that a good team doesn’t let those penalties become drive killers.

In the first game, the Redskins did have a drive killing holding call, but did you know it was against Terry Quinn and not the offensive line? Donald Penn also had a drive killing chop block penalty.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis and will enjoy this column in the week to come.

 

 

 

Statistics source: nflpenalties.com