Penalties – Nearly Irrelevant

Penalties, in college football, are irrelevant, at least when it comes to winning games.

The Sunday Morning Quarterback has been doing an in-depth statistical analysis of every major conference this season with the view towards determining which statistics are most relevant to winning. Most recently, he did an analysis of the Pac 10.

I have seen it suggested –repeatedly in fact - that the commission of a great deal of penalties is “poor coaching”. Well, statistically speaking at least, if penalties are "poor coaching", then a lot of poor coaches are winning a lot of football games.

In every analysis done by the SMQ thus far, penalty yards have been at or next to the bottom of the least significant statistic in winning a college football game. In fact, teams with more penalty yards are more likely to win than lose in every conference he has analyzed so far.

I have long suspected that certain types of penalty yards are more often than not a result of complicated offensive schemes. I have also suspected that these types of penalties, like delay of game’s and illegal motion’s, while frustrating have little effect on the game outcome. In this way of thinking, penalties are in fact merely an irritating symptom of an overall effectively operating offensive machine.

After reading the SMQ’s work, I decided to take a look at the Gator’s 2006 MNC season to see if the same held true.

The following list is the games in which Florida was more penalized than their opponent, and the outcome (team, yards penalized, score)–

Florida 102 – LSU 30: 23-10
Florida 90 – Western Carolina 35: 62-0
Florida 75 – Georgia 50: 21-14
Florida 71 – UCF 30: 42-0
Florida 71 – Kentucky 66: 26-7
Florida 67 – Arkansas 25: 38-28
Florida 65 – FSU 27: 21-14
Florida 65 – Tennessee 34: 21-20
Florida 53 – Alabama 26: 28-13
Florida 53 – Vanderbilt 33: 25-19

There were 2 games in which Florida was the least penalized team –

South Carolina 85 – Florida 49: 17-16
Auburn 40 – Florida 33: 17-27

So the Gator’s least penalized game this year was their only loss. The second least penalized game came to Spurrier’s Gamecocks, in a close win.

Games with huge penalty yards were generally comfortable wins.

(In the BCS title game the Gators and the Buckeyes both had exactly 50 penalty yards).

Certainly Steve Spurrier’s offensive juggernauts of the 1990’s were among the most penalized teams on an annual basis in the SEC. Many of those visor tossing incidents were a direct result of some delay of game penalty on a complicated play that the offense couldn’t get into motion in the allotted time.

I also suspect, though I have not fully run the stats, that penalty yards are closely linked to time of possession, especially in teams with complicated offensive schemes. Certainly this was true in the Auburn game, where Auburn won the possession battle 36:43 to 23:17.

In other words, I wish the Gators had be given the time to have committed more penalties in that game.

Certainly in the SEC, and elsewhere this year, having few penalties in no way corresponded to success, as the most penalized were Florida and Arkansas.

The least penalized team in the nation?

4-8 Northwestern.

If penalty yards are an indicator of “poor coaching”, then the best coached (fewest penalized) teams by major conference are –

ACC – Virginia
Big 10 – Northwestern
Big 12 – Iowa State
Big East – Connecticut
Pac 10 – Stanford
SEC – Vanderbilt


Now, anyone can name or recall some game where some ill timed penalty led to a situation where the other team won. Likewise, one can recall games where missed extra points have cost a game, or turnovers, or any other conceivable game situation relevant to college football. However, the incontrovertible statistical proof indicates that penalty yards do not hurt the team, and that the team with more yards penalized wins more often than not.

In some ways, this makes perfect sense. Take Florida’s most penalized game this year (LSU), and the 14 penalties committed. Of the 14, 5 were defensive, 2 special teams, and 7 on offense. The offensive penalties were 3 delay of games, 3 false starts, and 1 illegal shift. In the game, Florida had a longer possession time than LSU (32:35-27:25), and thus more opportunities to commit the type of small offensive penalties that complicated offenses seem to do so often. In Florida’s least penalized game (Auburn), the lack of possession time equaled few penalties.

Now, I am in no way “advocating” the commission of penalties as some sort of game winning strategy. However, it is pretty clear that highly penalized teams are neither poorly coached nor prone to losing.

And if you want the type of offensive strategies that come with a coach like Spurrier or Meyer, you had better get used to the penalties (South Carolina committed the second most total penalties, behind Florida, in the SEC this year).

I, for one, am willing to trade those annoying little penalties for titles.