Has the penalty discrepancy issue changed the last 2 weeks?

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

vs the Eagles no, vs the 49ers last sunday yes. We had 7 and they had 8 (not counting the 1 each team had declined). I believe it was also the first time since week 1 that our opponent had more flags then we did.

It surprising and nice to see for a change...though some of the calls were iffy on both sides we definitely got the benefit of a lot more

seabowl":3qxgoiy7 said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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Here's a site I've found to be very useful in tracking penalties.

http://www.nflpenalties.com/

seabowl":32la13zj said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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The sample size (14 games) is to small to draw anything but antedotal evidence. Not sure what you mean by conspiracy but if you are talking about someone from the NFL office telling the referee team to call less or more penalties against hawk opponents then you need to stop self medicating. If you are saying that referees are constantly being told to emphasize certain things, to look for certain things then that hardly qualifies as a conspiracy.

My theory is that the hawks play such an aggressive style of defense that the refs have tohold on to a lot of flags or else it would be a flag feat. If they are holding flags for the hawks then they do the same for the opponent. It's just that our aggressive style draws more fouls and the opponent less aggressive style doesn't meet the raised threshold.

HawkerD":1mw5gfup said:

My theory is that the hawks play such an aggressive style of defense that the refs have tohold on to a lot of flags or else it would be a flag feat. If they are holding flags for the hawks then they do the same for the opponent. It's just that our aggressive style draws more fouls and the opponent less aggressive style doesn't meet the raised threshold.

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I'm not buying that. Seems like we get way too many false starts, illegal formations, and countless other penalties that have nothing to do with aggressiveness.

I have a feeling if we were to cut all the false start penalties for the season even in half, the overall penalties for the Hawks vs opponent would look way different. I see penalties like a speeding ticket. You ever notice how if your record is clean, you can get pulled over like 5 times and just walk away with a warning. But the second you get an actual ticket on your record, any time you get pulled over there's no warning, it's just straight up ticket after ticket after ticket. Just means once your known as a team that gets a lot of penalties, you're in the hotseat, you can't just play like everyone else, you gotta be even cleaner, or expect the penalties.

A lot of our penalties are stupid, unnecessary ones. The league average this year thus far is 32.4 pre-snap penalties per team for the accumulated total on the season through week 15. We lead the league in pre-snap penalties with 56. The next closest team is Tampa Bay with 44. That is huge. If we merely had the league average ONLY for pre-snap penalties, that would be 24 fewer penalties and instead of leading the league overall for flags at 117 total right now, that'd drop us down to 93 total on the year to date, which would tie us with Indy and San Diego for 19th in the league.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot over, and over, and over, and over, and over with dumb penalties. We have 25 false starts on the year, for Christ's sake, and that's worst in the league; with more at HOME than on the ROAD.

Care less about the ones called on the Hawks, than the ones not called on other teams.

Anyone else notice Okung is ALWAYS ahead of the snap count by half a second? His backpedal is instantaneous to the hike. Surprised he doesn't get more false starts.

RolandDeschain":p1qz5vqf said:

A lot of our penalties are stupid, unnecessary ones. The league average thus year this far is 32.4 pre-snap penalties per team for the accumulated total on the season through week 15. We lead the league in pre-snap penalties with 56. The next closest team is Tampa Bay with 44. That is huge. If we merely had the league average ONLY for pre-snap penalties, that would be 24 fewer penalties and instead of leading the league overall for flags at 117 total right now, that'd drop us down to 93 total on the year to date, which would tie us with Indy and San Diego for 19th in the league.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot over, and over, and over, and over, and over with dumb penalties. We have 25 false starts on the year, for Christ's sake, and that's worst in the league; with more at HOME than on the ROAD.

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Well put, and the majority of these seem to come on 3rd down, which adds 5 yards to the next play. More than likely that next play had to be changed to give the team a chance to convert.

It also pretty much tells the D that a pass is coming. This could be part of the red zone deficiency.

Those 56 penalties add up to 280 yards in just the 5 yard variety and much more when a play is called back. Of course most of those are post snap, but they still help kill our scoring chances.

Weird stat about Okung:

All of his false starts have been on 3rd down
All of his holding calls have been on 1st down

Let's just put him out there on 2nd downs.


As for this past game, I thought the calls seemed fine for both sides, other than ones that may have been missed I guess. Everyone is raging about roughing the QB...the exact same thing happened during PIT/ATL just a few hours prior and no one has made a huge fuss over it. SF was already on its death bed, waiting for someone to pull the plug before week 17.

seabowl":3s5l9vz7 said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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In Sunday's game SF had 8 penalties and we had 7 penalties. The week before that, the Eagles had 4 and we had 8. With the exception of weeks 1 & 15 that's been the pattern - we draw between 8 and 14 penalties per game and our opponents draw between 2 and 6 penalties per game.

For the people who keep harping on how the Seahawks commit so many infractions - no one's saying the 'Hawks don't commit penalties. They do. The issue is that it's extremely unlikely that 10+ other teams suddenly sprouted temporary halos and had their cleanest games of the year against the Seahawks, even though they consistently drew twice as many flags playing against other teams. It's just not rationally possible without there being some level of intentional or unintentional referee bias.

But maybe the refs got the message and tried to keep their eyes peeled on both teams in the last game and that's why it was more even, I don't know. We'll see how the next game goes.

RolandDeschain":1no9tst0 said:

A lot of our penalties are stupid, unnecessary ones. The league average this year thus far is 32.4 pre-snap penalties per team for the accumulated total on the season through week 15. We lead the league in pre-snap penalties with 56. The next closest team is Tampa Bay with 44. That is huge. If we merely had the league average ONLY for pre-snap penalties, that would be 24 fewer penalties and instead of leading the league overall for flags at 117 total right now, that'd drop us down to 93 total on the year to date, which would tie us with Indy and San Diego for 19th in the league.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot over, and over, and over, and over, and over with dumb penalties. We have 25 false starts on the year, for Christ's sake, and that's worst in the league; with more at HOME than on the ROAD.

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Completely agree. It's mind numbing how this keeps going on. It seems like in the last couple of games, we've cleaned up the offsides by the defense a little bit, but OL bone headedness still prevails.

I won't say the refs looks to scew the last game in favor of the Hawks, but it looked like they were actually looking to throw flags on our opponent. The refs can't do much about our guys being dumb with presnap and obvious penalties, but it looks like they aren't keeping their flags in their pockets vs. our opponents like they have the entire year.

SnoCoHawk":12r8tv18 said:

seabowl":12r8tv18 said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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In Sunday's game SF had 8 penalties and we had 7 penalties. The week before that, the Eagles had 4 and we had 8. With the exception of weeks 1 & 15 that's been the pattern - we draw between 8 and 14 penalties per game and our opponents draw between 2 and 6 penalties per game.

For the people who keep harping on how the Seahawks commit so many infractions - no one's saying the 'Hawks don't commit penalties. They do. The issue is that it's extremely unlikely that 10+ other teams suddenly sprouted temporary halos and had their cleanest games of the year against the Seahawks, even though they consistently drew twice as many flags playing against other teams. It's just not rationally possible without there being some level of intentional or unintentional referee bias.

But maybe the refs got the message and tried to keep their eyes peeled on both teams in the last game and that's why it was more even, I don't know. We'll see how the next game goes.

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Glad someone understands what's going on. Someone on this board posted factual proof that something was fishy prior to 2 weeks ago with our opponents lack of penalties when playing the Hawks vs their other opponents. IMO the last 2 weeks since this was brought to light there has been a change and calls are being addressed against our opponents.

The problem I have has nothing to do with the amount of penalties that the Hawks get. My issue is the discrepancy almost all season how our opponents are flagged a lot less when they play against the Seahawks then any other team they play against. Don't compare our opponents flags vs our flags, compare their flags for the game vs their season avg for flags thrown in a game to see where the issue lies.

I doubt that the league told the refs to be lenient on our opponents. I feel that just like our opponents they seemed to play us harder as the super bowl champs in a way that the refs were more focused on our actions hence all the missed opportunities to balance out the flag situation. Perhaps they weren't realizing they were doing this in the first place, idk.

A sample size of 15 games is enough to see a pattern and there was an obvious pattern shown until week 15 game vs the 49ers. Arizona averages 6.2 penalties a game, lets see if they happen to match their season low of 3 again which happened to take place against the Super Bowl champs the Seahawks.

Dead ball fouls
False Start 25 League Avg 16.44
Defensive Offside 9 League Avg 3.5
Encroachment 3 League Avg 1.53
Illegal Motion 2 League Avg .25
Delay of Game 5 League Avg 3.81

Currently Seattle has been flagged 117 compared to our opponents at 63 which comes out to an average of 8.36 per game for the Hawks and 4.5 per game for the Opponent. If our dead ball fouls were at league avg we would be flagged on average 7 times per game for a season total of 98 flags. Even with those numbers it does not justify why our oppenents happen to be help to 4.5 a game.

All the teams we played this year with their season penalty total.
Denver 113
Washington 108
St. Louis 108
Oakland 103
Philadelphia 97
San Francisco 97
San Diego 93
Dallas 91
Arizona 87
Green Bay 82
N.Y. Giants 81
Kansas City 77
Carolina 73

Combined avg of all our opponents flags for the season (added 49ers 2x since we played them twice) 93.4
Combined total of all our opponents flags vs the Seahawks 63

That is quite the difference in our combined opponents numbers for the season vs the games played against only against our Seahawks.

lobohawk":1hxyoqbs said:

Care less about the ones called on the Hawks, than the ones not called on other teams.

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winner

seabowl":2twuekn2 said:

SnoCoHawk":2twuekn2 said:

seabowl":2twuekn2 said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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In Sunday's game SF had 8 penalties and we had 7 penalties. The week before that, the Eagles had 4 and we had 8. With the exception of weeks 1 & 15 that's been the pattern - we draw between 8 and 14 penalties per game and our opponents draw between 2 and 6 penalties per game.

For the people who keep harping on how the Seahawks commit so many infractions - no one's saying the 'Hawks don't commit penalties. They do. The issue is that it's extremely unlikely that 10+ other teams suddenly sprouted temporary halos and had their cleanest games of the year against the Seahawks, even though they consistently drew twice as many flags playing against other teams. It's just not rationally possible without there being some level of intentional or unintentional referee bias.

But maybe the refs got the message and tried to keep their eyes peeled on both teams in the last game and that's why it was more even, I don't know. We'll see how the next game goes.

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Glad someone understands what's going on. Someone on this board posted factual proof that something was fishy prior to 2 weeks ago with our opponents lack of penalties when playing the Hawks vs their other opponents. IMO the last 2 weeks since this was brought to light there has been a change and calls are being addressed against our opponents.

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Not sure if you are refering to my post but this is a post from a couple weeks ago that I made that seems fitting for this topic too. Mind you the numbers dont include the last 2 games vs the Eagles and 49ers.

Here are some facts: When I calculated the opponents avg I did not add their Seattle game into the numbers as I wanted show what they had for penalties against the hawks compared to the avg of the rest of their games this season.

# of Hawk penalties for game/Opponent/Opponent flag for game/Opponent avg # of penalties per game for the year
Seahawks 4 Green Bay 8 (5.6) = +3.4 season avg
Seahawks 8 @San Diego 6 (6.3) = -.3 season avg
Seahawks 7 Denver 4 (9.2) = -5.2 season avg
Seahawks 13 @Washington 3 (8) = -5 season avg
Seahawks 9 Dallas 6 (5.5) = +.5 season avg
Seahawks 10 @St Louis 2 (8.1) = -6.1 season avg
Seahawks 7 @Carolina 4 (5.4) = -1.4 season avg
Seahawks 9 Oakland 5 (7) = -2 season avg
Seahawks 6 Giants 4 (5.5) = -1.5 season avg
Seahawks 8 @KC 3 (4.9) = -1.9 season avg
Seahawks 7 Arizona 3 (6.5) = -3.5 season avg
Seahawks 14 @49ers 3 (7.2) = -4.2 season avg
Total Seahawk Penalties 102, Opponents 51

So what this tells me is of our 12 games this Season our opponents get flagged less against the Seahawks then their avg opponent. Of the 12 games only 2 have been called for more flags then a typical game of theirs (Packers and Cowboys). Our penalties suck but that isn't my issue, my issue is the lack of no calls on our opponents. We all know that if the refs wanted to toss a flag on either team for each play they could as you can always find an infraction if you look hard enough, they are just turning more of a blind out to who we play against then they are with the Seahawks.

Smellyman":1aebrvh3 said:

lobohawk":1aebrvh3 said:

Care less about the ones called on the Hawks, than the ones not called on other teams.

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winner

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No biggie but isn't this what the original post stated?

HawkerD":3rkfrr5a said:

seabowl":3rkfrr5a said:

Just wondering if anyone has tracked the penalties called against our opponents the last 2 weeks since it was brought to the attention of the media outlets? It seems like the opponents are finally getting flagged at a more normal rate. With that said if it has normalized its very troubling as the conspiracy theory would be even more enhanced by the sudden change in penalties called against our opponents. Just curious.

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The sample size (14 games) is to small to draw anything but antedotal evidence. Not sure what you mean by conspiracy but if you are talking about someone from the NFL office telling the referee team to call less or more penalties against hawk opponents then you need to stop self medicating. If you are saying that referees are constantly being told to emphasize certain things, to look for certain things then that hardly qualifies as a conspiracy.

My theory is that the hawks play such an aggressive style of defense that the refs have tohold on to a lot of flags or else it would be a flag feat. If they are holding flags for the hawks then they do the same for the opponent. It's just that our aggressive style draws more fouls and the opponent less aggressive style doesn't meet the raised threshold.

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Bullshit.

The most egregrious and consistent non calls come when our defense isn't even on the field. DPI vs Baldwin, which the NFL said was incorrect. The non review on the fumble vs the Rams.

Our aggressive defense is not to blame. They aren't even on the field half the time.