Many fans tout theories about officiating, but the fans of the teams that benefit from favorable officiating invariably try to silence the issue by claiming, “Every team gets calls for or against them, and our team is no different.”
I would put forth:
Pittsburgh Steelers
Oklahoma City Thunder
Los Angeles Lakers
Packers. For the love of god.
(Wait for all the Fail Mary whining to commence)
I can’t vouch for the fairness or accuracy of this, but ISTR a common complaint that Braves pitchers in the 90s got a very wide strike zone. I think Frank Deford (?) once groused that a Braves pitcher could throw to first base and get a called strike.
Some players seem to get the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never seen anything to suggest that teams do.
There are academic studies (I’ll try to find a cite) that show that home teams seem to get favorable calls. The suggestion is that the umpires/referees are influenced (subconsciously or not) but the fans in the stands.
Stars have always gotten special treatment from officials, in almost every sport. But the only TEAM in any sport that always SEEMS to get all the calls is…
The Steelers. Velocity is not imagining that. The refs should have been Super Bowl MVP rather than Hines Ward.
The Harlem Globetrotters?
Fergie Time.
It is even mentioned on his Wikipedia page with a link to an analysis of the data from the BBC:
“Tuck Rule,” anyone?
That was 100% according to the rules of the game. It may have been bad rule making, but it was perfect refereeing.
I think that’s one of those calls that will never be fully resolved to the satisfaction of the fans.
The New York Daily News ran a story in January where they were still calling it a fumble.
Too many people have claimed it a fumble. Brady was pump-faking, not attempting a pass. The call was blown (in the opinion of this Colts fan). He wasn’t passing. He fumbled.
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The rules don’t distinguish between a pump fake and a pass attempt.
Tim Donaghy is not the most reliable of witnesses. Also, the nature of the accusation is not that the Lakers systemically get calls, but that they got calls in this one game so the series would be extended.
If there was evidence a major North American sports franchise systemically got the calls, it would be laid out in more spreadsheets than you could count, not “oh remember that one bad call from fifteen years ago” anecdotes. The evidence would be well assembled by enterprising sports fans.
Other than slight unconscious bias toward the home team, refs don’t favor one team over another. It’s merely a case that you saw the team you are rooting against get a high-profile call in their favor (either mistaken or correct).
Every team that’s not the team I’m rooting for, if my team loses.
Nobody, if my team wins.
People used to say that baseball stars in the past such as Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio got breaks on balls and strike calls because an umpire figured that if the pitch was a strike, he would swing at it. Some umpires’ memoirs (Jocko Conlan, Doug Harvey) say that a lot of these guys who had bad reputations with the press (Williams, Rogers Hornsby, Bill Terry, Dick Allen) were very reasonable men when hitting. No whining, if you missed an occasional one they understood you were human. Or pitchers would get a break on a pitch on a corner if they had shown in the past they had pretty good control.
I think it’s abundantly clear that the league doesn’t favor the Pats at all. You can be pissed about the Tuck rule if you want, but it’s basically the same thing as the confusion about the Catch/No Catch rule. A grey area that isn’t well understood by fans and isn’t consistently interpreted by the refs. That’s not bias, it might be dumb, but it’s not bias.
The bias shows itself in the frequency of all those subjective, every down type penalties like pass interference, holding and to some degree the various QB protections in place.
“Used to”? The problem is rampant.
When I was stationed in NYC years ago, I made $800 betting on the NFL. I got a very good tip. I got “the word” (that seemed to be accurate) that a certain “Zebra” was going to retire after that season and was working on his retirement plan. Any game that he was officiating in, I’d bet on the underdog to beat the point spread. They always did.