Tighter officiating a qualified failure?

[CowbellGuy]

It seems whenever any given league decides to crack down on something through officiating, it gets a lot of press, earns some token calls and fades to oblivion before the season's halfway done. Looks like more of the same for this year's NCAA obstruction mandates.

First off, it doesn't help when you have an inconsistent and cobbled-together rulebook. The way it's written at the moment, there can't be an "interference" call without it having to be "obstruction interference." Obstruction calls happen away from the puck, and interference is, by definition, away from the puck. So it's always going to be obstruction. Fine, it's redundant and silly, but that's the way it is.

However, the refs, among other things, don't seem to understand this. While you have some refs calling "obstruction" penalties, rather than using it as a modifier as intended, this past weekend there was not a single "obstruction" modifier attached to any call, despite four "interference" calls. If the refs can't even be bothered to learn the rules, how can you expect them to enforce mandates? Of course, that pales to the incosistent, atrocious gamecalling. If the ECACHL, or whatever they're going to be calling themselves, wants to be taken seriously, they need to find officials above the peewee level.

Out of curiosity, I looked at minor penalties called in non-exhibition games for Cornell since the '99-00 season. Doesn't seem to be much different this year and there's actually a downward trend since '99.

[A-19]

what's the large spike at 169? our first game this year or something?

[David Harding]

[Q]A-19 Wrote:

 what's the large spike at 169? our first game this year or something?[/q]

Yes, against McGill.
http://db.elynah.com/game.php?game=157

[Trotsky]

I hear next year they'll have a blue ribbon commission to really get to the bottom of interference in the league.  ;-)

[billhoward]

Nice graph: Officiating crackdown appears not to have happened. Let's hope someone in the NCAA hockey committee is doing this for all games for all teams and then crosstabbing by league, team, penalty type, conference vs. non, perecentage of the way into season (vs. games into the season since some play fewer than others), penalties by ice surface size, etcetera. And then crosstab it again against goals per game. Some of it's going to be painfully redundant, but out of their mess maybe there'll be a few gems.

Is it possible the NCAA proved its point that it wanted to reduce obstruction interference (because of too many 1-0 and 2-1 snoozefests like last spring's NCAA title game)? That the fewer calls is because the message is out and there's less obstruction interference? The outcome the NCAA really wanted was not more obstruction penalties or fewer obstructions but more goals, like those 9-8 seesaw games. Cornell is not doing its part because it's found a way to win with a good defense that appears not to be drawing more penalties than other teams.

I was wondering if outliers (perhaps 46 PIM slugefests) affected the outcome (trend line), but you've already taken care of part of that by discounting ten-minute penalties.

Maybe they're just going to have to make the goals bigger. Or if youi want scoring to go up, to get Schafer to change his philosophy.

[CowbellGuy]

And 5 minutes were discounted as well. The spike shouldn't be McGill because it didn't count exhibition games. Those divider lines were hand-drawn approximations. The season averages are precise, though.

[Jacob '06]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

Is it possible the NCAA proved its point that it wanted to reduce obstruction interference (because of too many 1-0 and 2-1 snoozefests like last spring's NCAA title game)? That the fewer calls is because the message is out and there's less obstruction interference?
 [/q]

In short, absolutely not. If you watched Saturday's game you would have seen all kinds of obstruction interference with Clarkson players holding our players up along the boards away from the play with the referee staring directly at them and calling nothing.  I think the refs just dropped it a few games in to the season.

[billhoward]

How much can college hockey do to make the officials do what college hockey wants them to do? Where's the levereage: The pay sucks. There's some prestige but not a lot. It's not like major league baseball or football where you've got a pool of willing and probably able replacements if the ump doesn't call balls and strikes the way MLB wants them called.

[billhoward]

There were a bunch of 5's early in the season but not recently?  If the chart showed # of penalties (2:00 or 5:00 counts as 1, 10:00 not counted) I wonder if it would change.

Not trying to make light of all the work you've done. It just seemed as if there was a surge of penalties earlier on this year, but looking back and also seeing your chart it's not clear if there really was, or it was just that everytime an obstruction or hitting from behind got called, it got a lot of comment.

Someday there's going to be this incredible database all ready for us to play with, down to what color jersey they wore and who else was on the ice when a penalty or offside was called. Maybe every rink will have 3 roofcams pointing down creating a montage video that IDs players, puck, referee and then it's just compute time that creates a game summary and all kinds of stats. It would give us something to do in the offseason that approaches in about a month.

[CowbellGuy]

It's not really up to the NCAA in this case. It's up to the league. Suck it up, pay the refs better, get better refs. Problem solved.

[David Harding]

[q] Nice graph: Officiating crackdown appears not to have happened. Let's hope someone in the NCAA hockey committee is doing this for all games for all teams and then crosstabbing by league, team, penalty type, conference vs. non, perecentage of the way into season (vs. games into the season since some play fewer than others), penalties by ice surface size, etcetera. And then crosstab it again against goals per game. Some of it's going to be painfully redundant, but out of their mess maybe there'll be a few gems. [/q]
It would be really importanmt to crosstab it by referee.

[DL]

Perhaps the tighter officiating is everywhere but ECAC/HE ?
We love to talk about Clarkson's goons, but for all their efforts, they only come in at #19...
http://www.uscho.com/stats/conf.php?conf=d1

[David Harding]

[Q]David Harding Wrote:

 [Q2]A-19 Wrote:

 what's the large spike at 169? our first game this year or something?[/Q]
Yes, against McGill.

[/q]
No, I was fooled by the coincidence that there were 26 minutes of penalties in the McGill game.  In Age's numbering 169 is the BC game which had 26 minor penalties (plus one major and one game for a total of 67 minutes).  

[Will]

[Q]Darren Leung Wrote:

 Perhaps the tighter officiating is everywhere but ECAC/HE ?
We love to talk about Clarkson's goons, but for all their efforts, they only come in at #19...
[/q]

Which is significantly higher than us at #52 (out of 58): http://www.collegehockeystats.net/0405/national/d1m
Scroll 3/4 of the way down the page to see the Penalty Minutes list.

[Tub(a)]

[Q]Will Wrote:

 [Q2]Darren Leung Wrote:

 Perhaps the tighter officiating is everywhere but ECAC/HE ?
We love to talk about Clarkson's goons, but for all their efforts, they only come in at #19...
[/Q]
Which is significantly higher than us at #52 (out of 58):
Scroll 3/4 of the way down the page to see the Penalty Minutes list.[/q]

Damn, we are SUCH a clutch and grab team! :-P