re: Stats how Alabama is blessed with targeting calls; even in the games they don't play...

I'm not sure how may targeting calls there have been this year but last year there were 27 in the SEC.

quote:

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[In 2017] The SEC confirmed 27 instances of its players being flagged for targeting but declined to provide details of five calls not reported on play-by-play sheets or by the media. In all, the AP could not account for seven targeting penalties out of the 188 reported by the NCAA. source

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So, is it unusual that 4 targeting calls would benefit Alabama more than it might benefit other teams? Let's work with some numbers...

To make the math a little simpler, let's say there are 28 targeting calls this year in the SEC. (This is a working assumption. I don't know the actual stats. But 27 was 2nd most out of any conference last year; so, 28 might be high and would make the math conservative here when we start dividing.) Let's assume further that NO MORE calls benefit Alabama for rest of the season (even though we've only played 2/3 of the regular season games so far). If we go with these assumptions, by the end of the season 4 out of 28 targeting calls, or 1 out of 7, would directly benefited Alabama in one game OR the next game. That would leave 24, of 6 out of 7, for the other 13 schools to divvy up. 24 divided by 13 would be a little shy of 2 per school, assuming that these were called somewhat evenly. That said, some schools might have 3 called on opponents while others have 1.

What is striking, though, is how (1) the players called in these Alabama cases are TOP players on their respective teams, and (2) the timing of these calls benefit Alabama (in first quarter of game against Alabama, so players miss 3/4 of the game, of the very end of the prior game, meaning players miss a guaranteed 1/2 of the game).

So, what are the chances that a team benefits from FOUR ejections AND that all four are TOP players AND that the timing is such that the game time missed is MAXIMIZED.

Also, remember that my math was conservative here. Alabama could have 1 more called in their favor (to make it 5) and there might be fewer than 27 this year (let's say 25)...then we could get numbers like 5/25 (1/5) or 4/24 (1/6) benefiting Alabama.

So...do we have smoke here?

Or did I just have a bunch of fun playing the crazy, obsessed LSU fan?