AsylumGuido

I'm well aware of those statistics and posted that same article myself soon after it was published. I would like to know who the other teams were that were ranked 30th thru 32nd those years. Is there a bias against them, as well? Or can all of these teams be classified as undisciplined?

To give you some credit, I must admit that you at least are simply suspecting a bias and not an organized plot to orchestrate outcomes of Saints games as some infer. When referring to the "non-call" versus the Rams I spoke of the possibility of an unintentional bias based upon the home state of several of the key officials involved. I do not believe they intentionally ignored the call just to ensure that the Saints lost, but I could understand a hesitancy in throwing a flag at a critical point in the game. Could they have felt some fear of reprisal from their own neighbors? I don't know. Maybe. I actually saw it more as a case of incompetency. Instead of making a call at a critical moment they froze. They screwed up. But, they have their comfy REAL jobs to return to the following Monday.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Winston Churchill

BakoSaint

Obviously other teams also finished 30th-32nd in penalties called against their opponents each year. The bottom 3 in a league of 32 is essentially they bottom 10%, somebody has to finish in the bottom 10% of getting penalties called against their opponents just by chance, even if their opponents are random, its simply 1 in 10. The thing is, for the Saints, 1 in 10 has happened 4 years in a row. Thats 1 in 10 in 10 in 10 in 10. Thats 1 in 10,000. The pft article I quote calculates the odds of this happening by chance at 0.0077% or about 1 in 12,000, so similar to my simple math. Thats not likely to be chance. The people who believe it is chance must believe that every other team, as we have played through the league, has suddenly become angels who commit few penalties the week they play us, year after year, highly consistently. Its much easier to believe some refs are bias.

I don't think there is an organized conspiracy per say but I also don't think its unconscious bias per say. I think if you could hook up Roger Goodell to a polygraph and ask him if he may have ever done anything that could have given refs or league employees who work with refs the hint or indication that some teams should be treated more harshly and others less harshly for personal or economic reasons and he answered no he would fail that lie detector test. I don't think he gave an order or wrote a memo, but I think he gave a few hints in private that he ain't wearing any black and gold on any sundays.

I think if you gave refs a polygraph and asked them if they have ever made harsher calls against a team because they don't like that team, don't like that teams fans, felt insulted by that team disagreeing with previous calls, or felt pressure from the league to favor certain teams, and they said no, at least a significant number would fail that polygraph, while others would pass, but some of them might fail a followup asking whether they suspect any of their colleagues might have. I don't think there is an over determination to fix the outcome of games, but I think there is a conscious bias in a lot of individuals to protect the shield and protect the whistle in ways that mean holding different teams to different standards, and which ultimately tilts the outcome of many close games to favored teams, and most of all against the most statistically disfavored team since the no call, the team that both blamed the refs for tainting the superbowl and overturned not one but a handful of Roger Goodell's treasured player suspensions in bountygate, public enemy #1.