re: Of Tom Ritter and Bama

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OP, I am curious as to where you got these stats, as they are not the run of the mill stats one can just pick up from the internet. A source in the league office? I have a friend who refs in the ACC and he said that all such stats are almost state secrets & never out there for the general public's review.

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The raw numbers aren't hard to find. The old newspaper style box score has the usual stats but also includes things like attendance and the officiating crew. It isn't in the box scores you find on sites like ESPN, but they're still available. Bama's official site has very in depth stats for all the seasons under Saban (don't know how far back they go). Here's the page with links to this year and here is the LSU game for an example of what's available.

Once you've got the raw numbers, the rest is nothing more that a simple Excel spreadsheet. For this analysis, I just created a sheet with year, referee, opponent, result (w/l), points for and against, penalties for and against, and penalty yardage for and against. Throw in some sorting, grouping, a few formulas, a there you have it.

Sounds like a lot but it really wasn't. We're talking about less than 80 games. The whole thing took less than an hour - and that included 15 minutes wasted finding stats for a couple of games that are mislinked on Bama's website.