Officiating On The Road

[RockawayHoya]

www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-basketball/stat/personal-foul-pct

Someone linked this website a few weeks back and pointed out our propensity to foul this year, which has been undeniable. But just how bad has it been? After the foul fests at both Marquette and Nova, I got curious and looked it up. Out of 351 D-1 teams:

Personal fouls per game: 22.0 (324th), 17.3 (148th in 2013)
Personal fouls per game at home: 18.9 (222nd), 15.4 (63rd in 2013)
Personal fouls per game on the road: 25.1 (349th), 19.6 (253rd in 2013)

When you adjust for pace and sort by fouls per defensive possession, the numbers are understandably even worse:

Percentage of defensive possessions that end in a foul: 32.7% (341st), 26.7% (215th in 2013)
Percentage of defensive possessions that end in a foul at home: 28.2% (256th), 23.7% (118th in 2013)
Percentage of defensive possessions that end in a foul on the road: 37.1% (351st), 30.1% (303rd in 2013)

You read right. Yes, our Hoyas foul more per defensive possession this year on the road than any team in the country. All of them. And it's not close.

So why more fouls this year? It's certainly a combination of factors. Otto was a pretty good individual and team defender (and helped make our zone better than god-awful like this year), so losing him hurt. The new rules obviously came into play and affected every team across the board. The coaching staff may not have been as quick to adjust teaching players how to play legal defense soon or well enough. And of course, although Josh was a poor defender, losing him meant more minutes for even MORE foul-prone guys like Moses.

But the disparity we've witnessed this year between home and away games is scary and I'm not certain all of it can be attributed to the factors I've listed above. You obviously expect fouls to be higher on the road than at home. It's like that for almost every team, no doubt. Especially for the high majors who play a bunch of lower level teams mostly at home in the OOC, the numbers will obviously be skewed further by playing lesser competition at home. But you can easily see from that table that just about every other team is not seeing a 6+ foul disparity on average between home and away games. The national averages for fouls per game at home vs. away are 18.4/20.0, a difference of less than 2 fouls a game. In fact, only one team (Kent State at 7.3 more fouls per game on the road) in the entire country has Georgetown (+6.2 fouls per game on the road) beat in this department during this season.

Did we simply forget how to play defense when we were on the road? Or did we get hosed by the refs more consistently on the road than most other teams? I think that after looking at these numbers, a significant portion (but not all) of our road woes from an officiating standpoint have to do with the officials themselves. Do we have a lot that we need to work on in order to improve for next year? Absolutely. There's no getting around the fact that we were an inconsistent team at best from a defensive standpoint this year. But that doesn't fully explain our home/road splits this year in the fouling categories and it just can't be all attributed to rule changes and losing one superstar player.

[gujake]

Nice post, though I'm skeptical of your conclusion about the refs for a number of reasons:

1. Small sample size. We played a bunch of neutral court games, so the sample of home/away games isn't that large, which can lead to strange numbers.
2. Our road schedule consisted of Kansas and Big East teams only, and our out of conference home schedule was especially poor this year.
3. You would expect the teams with the most road fouls to have the biggest difference in fouls comparing road/home. It's no coincidence that Kent State and Georgetown are the two teams with the most road fouls per possession, and the two teams with the largest difference between road/home fouls.
4. It doesn't really make sense. Why would officials have a special bias against Georgetown? We have had lots of different officials on the road this year, and those officials are traveling around doing lots of different games.

[FLHoya]

Mar 11, 2014 0:09:36 GMT -5 gujake said:

Nice post, though I'm skeptical of your conclusion about the refs for a number of reasons:

1. Small sample size. We played a bunch of neutral court games, so the sample of home/away games isn't that large, which can lead to strange numbers.
2. Our road schedule consisted of Kansas and Big East teams only, and our out of conference home schedule was especially poor this year.
3. You would expect the teams with the most road fouls to have the biggest difference in fouls comparing road/home. It's no coincidence that Kent State and Georgetown are the two teams with the most road fouls per possession, and the two teams with the largest difference between road/home fouls.
4. It doesn't really make sense. Why would officials have a special bias against Georgetown? We have had lots of different officials on the road this year, and those officials are traveling around doing lots of different games.

5. Also, we're pretty evidently awful at defense. Any explanation of why we're fouling so much that doesn't include "we don't stay in front of guys on the perimeter," "we struggle with communication and defensive rotations," "our players bite on most shot fakes," and "our interior defenders...eh, just look at 'em" isn't being intellectually honest.

[Buckets]

You're also concluding that our home fouling frequency at home is more indicative of our "true" fouling frequency and that any deviations on the road are the result of road officiating. For what it's worth, the round robin schedule makes for straightforwards comparisons in conference games. Below, sorted by total, is road/home/difference fouls

DePaul: 210/201/9
Georgetown: 219/174/45
Marquette: 185/181/4
St. John's: 170/180/-10
Villanova: 187/159/28
Seton Hall: 181/159/22
Xavier: 179/157/22
Creighton: 174/151/23
Providence: 157/166/-9
Butler: 149/154/-5

We didn't have any positive road-home foul matchups, we were +13 against Creighton (24 on the road to 11 at home), +9 against Butler, then +5 against Providence, Seton Hall, St. John's, and Marquette, +2 against Xavier, +1 against DePaul, and 0 against Villanova. That Creighton difference is indicative of what I was talking about earlier: in my opinion, Georgetown (especially Hopkins) got away with far more physical defense on McDermott than we're getting on any neutral court. I don't recall the circumstances of both Butler games that well. Overtime on the road was at least a contributing factor (three fouls), and in the game at home, we just escorted Chrabascz to the basket several times instead of our typical strategy of hacking.

[RockawayHoya]

Jake, I agree with 4, and I can't explain it. Another poster spoke to me off-line and asked me if there were home/away numbers available for conference vs. non-conference games. I think it'd be interesting to take a look at. Also, I'm not sure how this site takes into account neutral games, and whether or not they are considered road games (points 1 and 2).

I agree we are awful at defense and made mention of it. No matter what the FGdef% stats that almost all commentators cite during our games say, we are generally a mediocre defensive team. We definitely commit more dumb fouls than most teams, and much of it in situations that FL has described in the previous post. But I've also found myself questioning a lot of fouls too that, many times having nothing to do with the play itself, just seemingly come out of nowhere. Those are the fouls I'm referring to that I'm questioning. Are we getting them because of a bad rep? I've gotten on JT3 earlier this year for not protecting his players enough from bad officiating, but I have seen him considerably more animated and demonstrative towards refs as the season has gone on, so it's definitely wearing on him as well and he is coming closer to "doing something about it." In any case, I think it's worth it for our staff to look into, especially during the offseason.

[GUJook97]

Thanks for posting. Personally, I still think this is an amazing stat for a team that is still in contention to make the NCAA tourney. As was said, we are comparable to one of the worst teams in any major conference: DePaul.

Buckets point is also what worries me about playing Dougie McBuckets at MSG. I dont think Hopkins will ever get away with what he did again. Granted, I agree that Dougie was flopping all over the place, but Hopkins is also a foul machine who somehow got to play the most physical defense all season against the presumptive national player of the year.

We are awful at defense, FL, but 324th means that we are fouling at rates of teams with 20+ losses, no? That seems uncanny.

[RockawayHoya]

Mar 11, 2014 8:26:10 GMT -5 Buckets said:

You're also concluding that our home fouling frequency at home is more indicative of our "true" fouling frequency and that any deviations on the road are the result of road officiating. For what it's worth, the round robin schedule makes for straightforwards comparisons in conference games. Below, sorted by total, is road/home/difference fouls

DePaul: 210/201/9
Georgetown: 219/174/45
Marquette: 185/181/4
St. John's: 170/180/-10
Villanova: 187/159/28
Seton Hall: 181/159/22
Xavier: 179/157/22
Creighton: 174/151/23
Providence: 157/166/-9
Butler: 149/154/-5

We didn't have any positive road-home foul matchups, we were +13 against Creighton (24 on the road to 11 at home), +9 against Butler, then +5 against Providence, Seton Hall, St. John's, and Marquette, +2 against Xavier, +1 against DePaul, and 0 against Villanova. That Creighton difference is indicative of what I was talking about earlier: in my opinion, Georgetown (especially Hopkins) got away with far more physical defense on McDermott than we're getting on any neutral court. I don't recall the circumstances of both Butler games that well. Overtime on the road was at least a contributing factor (three fouls), and in the game at home, we just escorted Chrabascz to the basket several times instead of our typical strategy of hacking.

Great post. Don't forget we played OT against Marquette at home too, so factoring those 4 intentional fouls we had late when the game got away just further illustrate how egregiously bad the road game against them last week was.

The Butler road game was comical in terms of how many touch fouls were being called. It's a miracle we won that game under the circumstances it was played in, which just goes to show you how mediocre we actually are (a good Georgetown team doesn't struggle with this bad of a Butler team on the road regardless of foul trouble).

[MCIGuy]

Mar 11, 2014 8:51:54 GMT -5 RockawayHoya said:

Mar 11, 2014 8:26:10 GMT -5 Buckets said:

You're also concluding that our home fouling frequency at home is more indicative of our "true" fouling frequency and that any deviations on the road are the result of road officiating. For what it's worth, the round robin schedule makes for straightforwards comparisons in conference games. Below, sorted by total, is road/home/difference fouls

DePaul: 210/201/9
Georgetown: 219/174/45
Marquette: 185/181/4
St. John's: 170/180/-10
Villanova: 187/159/28
Seton Hall: 181/159/22
Xavier: 179/157/22
Creighton: 174/151/23
Providence: 157/166/-9
Butler: 149/154/-5

We didn't have any positive road-home foul matchups, we were +13 against Creighton (24 on the road to 11 at home), +9 against Butler, then +5 against Providence, Seton Hall, St. John's, and Marquette, +2 against Xavier, +1 against DePaul, and 0 against Villanova. That Creighton difference is indicative of what I was talking about earlier: in my opinion, Georgetown (especially Hopkins) got away with far more physical defense on McDermott than we're getting on any neutral court. I don't recall the circumstances of both Butler games that well. Overtime on the road was at least a contributing factor (three fouls), and in the game at home, we just escorted Chrabascz to the basket several times instead of our typical strategy of hacking.

Great post. Don't forget we played OT against Marquette at home too, so factoring those 4 intentional fouls we had late when the game got away just further illustrate how egregiously bad the road game against them last week was.

The Butler road game was comical in terms of how many touch fouls were being called. It's a miracle we won that game under the circumstances it was played in, which just goes to show you how mediocre we actually are (a good Georgetown team doesn't struggle with this bad of a Butler team on the road regardless of foul trouble).

The team was "mediocre" that game because it was still getting used to Josh Smith's absence, it was without Jabril for the first game because of his injury to his jaw, Markel was in a bit of a shooting funk and the team had just placed Bowen or Cameron in the starting lineup for the first time and that took some getting used to. As I argued before the issue with this team was its lack of quality depth. Taking one or two pieces away made all the difference in the world from a team that could win the BE to a team that had to struggle to survive in the BE. This team needed a season in which no one was suspended, no one got into any academic difficulties and no one had a serious injury which caused them to miss games. Unrealistic? Not really. Most of III's teams, particularly his deepest and most talented ones, had avoided those blemishes. This season we made up for it by experiencing all of those problems at once it seems. That's deadly for a squad with such little room for error.

Still, I have a hard time accepting that this squad was so physically inferior and so less intelligent than virtually every other D1 team in America that it would finish worse than anyone else in terms of fouling during road games. First of all the team isn't even that ::bleep:: aggressive in the first place on either end to warrant so many whistles.

[SFHoya99]

It doesn't have to be official bias relative to Georgetown. It could just be that our fouling style / defensive style is more sensitive to the home/road bias more officials have.

Still, being the worst in all of college basketball on the road seems odd for this team. We're not a good defensive team, but we're not THAT bad.

[chep3]

Yeah, but as FL said, boy are we bad at defense. It's been clear since Oregon that this team doesn't talk on the court as much as the last one did, and as a result, our rotations are terrible (just think of how many times against Nova Nate rotated to the guy above the break in transition, leaving a guy at the corner entirely undefended). We are also lazy defensively, at least on the interior, so no one does their work early, gets into a bad position, and then decides that they can solve it all by taking a blind swipe at the ball.

[GIGAFAN99]

It's almost as if we fundamentally think a lightly contested 15 footer is a worse option than a head fake blow by or two free throws. The number of long twos we bite on is just head scratching. Really, the 6'10 Frankenstein guy, you lunged at his jumper, allowed him to get the offensive board follow and an and-1 because of it? The corner 18 footer, you left your feet for?

We can talk about the refs all we want but FHills had a post where he set an over under for threes and would wildly contest against Creighton because that's what we do. The Hoyas were under that game. Same goes for Michigan State.

More of this fouling is under our control than we think. And if the Hoyas shake the "Epic Flail" defensive rep, the referee bias takes care of itself I'd imagine.

[MCIGuy]

Mar 11, 2014 9:47:19 GMT -5 chep3 said:

Yeah, but as FL said, boy are we bad at defense. It's been clear since Oregon that this team doesn't talk on the court as much as the last one did, and as a result, our rotations are terrible (just think of how many times against Nova Nate rotated to the guy above the break in transition, leaving a guy at the corner entirely undefended). We are also lazy defensively, at least on the interior, so no one does their work early, gets into a bad position, and then decides that they can solve it all by taking a blind swipe at the ball.

Okay, but do you actually think that the Hoyas communicated less, moved their feet worse, were less capable of staying in front of opponents and all-around less intelligent than players on all the other teams in D1? Because that's essentially where we are headed in terms of an explanation.

[MCIGuy]

I truly think that being fans often mean you either have too rosy a view of your team or too pessimistic a one. Sometimes a fan can struggle with both at times. Last season at this time people were mostly high on our guys as defenders. Now, just with the loss of Otto and a couple of new rule chnages, we become horrible?

I watch plenty of Nova games and Marquette games this season. Those teams foul all the time and don't get called for the ticky-tack stuff that this Hoya team is called for. Maybe it is absurd to suggest the refs reward aggression and don't have any fear of calling fouls on teams with coaches who will give them the least hassle (ala III). But it is also absurd for Hoya fans to sit and think that this Hoya team are doing things worse on the court than virtually every other team in the nation. When you've gotten to that point in which you view a team with a winning record and a handful of major victories (unlike DePaul or, say, Howard University) in such a negative way, then it may be a matter of personal disappointment getting in the way of objectivity.

[GIGAFAN99]

Mar 11, 2014 10:02:16 GMT -5 MCIGuy said:

Mar 11, 2014 9:47:19 GMT -5 chep3 said:

Yeah, but as FL said, boy are we bad at defense. It's been clear since Oregon that this team doesn't talk on the court as much as the last one did, and as a result, our rotations are terrible (just think of how many times against Nova Nate rotated to the guy above the break in transition, leaving a guy at the corner entirely undefended). We are also lazy defensively, at least on the interior, so no one does their work early, gets into a bad position, and then decides that they can solve it all by taking a blind swipe at the ball.

Okay, but do you actually think that the Hoyas communicated less, moved their feet worse, were less capable of staying in front of opponents and all-around less intelligent than players on all the other teams in D1? Because that's essentially where we are headed in terms of an explanation.

Keep in mind we played a top 5 schedule. So there's no hiding our defensive deficiencies. And it's not only that we're bad it's how we're bad. We foul Lipscomb on a good day with an advantage physically. A schedule of nothing but average to great offenses and there you go.

[canissaxa]

Rockaway is referencing my original post, and I was sort of surprised that it didn't get more attention at the time.

I think it boils down to an admirable desire on behalf of the board not to blame the refs coupled with an acknowledgement of our very obvious defensive flaws.

Also, outside the tin-foil-hatted conspiracy theorists, it just doesn't make sense that we would be particularly targeted by multiple officiating crews.

For me, the reason for the result boils down to 4 things--only 2 of which are fixable in the short term:
1) We didn't adjust well to the new officiating rules (fixable)
2) We developed a reputation for a foul prone team with foul prone bigs (somewhat fixable -- at least to lobby the officials on some of the questionable fouls where Nate and Moses were whistled when the opponent initiated contact)
3) We aren't that good at defense (not tremendously fixable)
4) We don't have a great home court advantage given the size of our arena vs our alumni base (not easily fixable). I'll certainly grant that Creighton was an exception to our typically weak home court--it was noticeable how much they let us play compared to almost every game this year.

[canissaxa]

Oh, and reason #5: Any time you end up dead last in any category, you have some bad luck.

This season is just about in the books and not much we can do at this point. We should keep an eye on it next year because the one thing Rockaway left off is that JTIII has been consistently at D1 average in fouling stats during his time at GU. There was a marked jump in our foul rates this year and it was bigger for Georgetown than for any other team (South Carolina was close and Martin has a reputation for fouling until the refs just can't call it any more).

One year is an aberration. Two years is a pattern.

[MCIGuy]

Mar 11, 2014 10:17:14 GMT -5 canissaxa said:

Rockaway is referencing my original post, and I was sort of surprised that it didn't get more attention at the time.

I think it boils down to an admirable desire on behalf of the board not to blame the refs coupled with an acknowledgement of our very obvious defensive flaws.

Also, outside the tin-foil-hatted conspiracy theorists, it just doesn't make sense that we would be particularly targeted by multiple officiating crews.

For me, the reason for the result boils down to 4 things--only 2 of which are fixable in the short term:
1) We didn't adjust well to the new officiating rules (fixable)
2) We developed a reputation for a foul prone team with foul prone bigs (somewhat fixable -- at least to lobby the officials on some of the questionable fouls where Nate and Moses were whistled when the opponent initiated contact)
3) We aren't that good at defense (not tremendously fixable)
4) We don't have a great home court advantage given the size of our arena vs our alumni base (not easily fixable). I'll certainly grant that Creighton was an exception to our typically weak home court--it was noticeable how much they let us play compared to almost every game this year.

Good stuff. As for the short term, well, this season could end in a couple of games so the short term could be the beginning of next season. Unless you meant short term to refer to the remainder of this season only.


Point #4 is a fascinating one to think about. Refs are human and therefore loud homecourts can often make the difference at any level of basketball.

[GUJook97]

I sorta wish III would have found some ways to better make this point throughout the year to see if it would have any effect on the way our games officiated. It's just not his nature. Can you imagine if Syracuse was 336 in foul rate? The good news, I suppose, is that the MSU game in the garden was one of the most favorably officiated games of the year for us.

[FLHoya]

Mar 11, 2014 10:02:16 GMT -5 MCIGuy said:

Okay, but do you actually think that the Hoyas communicated less, moved their feet worse, were less capable of staying in front of opponents and all-around less intelligent than players on all the other teams in D1? Because that's essentially where we are headed in terms of an explanation.

It's certainly a more plausible explanation than anything to do with officiating bias.

[FLHoya]

Mar 11, 2014 10:25:46 GMT -5 GUJook97 said:

I sorta wish III would have found some ways to better make this point throughout the year to see if it would have any effect on the way our games officiated. It's just not his nature. Can you imagine if Syracuse was 336 in foul rate? The good news, I suppose, is that the MSU game in the garden was one of the most favorably officiated games of the year for us.

Right, but I don't think his personality has changed much in 10 years regarding how he engages officials. So you'd still have to account for why this season we had such an awful foul rate, and JTIII's working the refs isn't a legit variable here.

I still think the most likely explanation is the current mix of players just stink at defending in specific ways that inflate a foul total.