Interesting tidbit about penalties

[sc85sis]

First let me say that I don't like the high number of penalties we've seen the last two games. Obviously Pete can't be happy about it either, and the team does need to keep working to clean that up.

Having said that, I heard an interesting factoid during the post-game radio coverage: The most-penalized team last season was the Ravens, with the '9ers coming in third, the Hawks 4th and the Redskins 5th. According to [urltargetblank]http://www.nflpenalties.com/[/urltargetblank], St. Louis was the second-most penalized team.

I also remember hearing somewhere (but don't remember where) that some of the most successful college teams were heavily penalized. It might have been mentioned during a USC broadcast a few years ago.

Sometimes good teams draw a lot of flags because they play so aggressively. Hopefully the Hawks can reduce it down to a reasonable level (and the officials do a better job), but we may find that this team tends to draw the yellow hankies simply because of their style of play.

 

[kearly]

An additional silver lining is that after Super Bowl XL and the officiating debacle of the 2005-2006 playoffs, the NFL became very sensitive to poor officiating in the postseason and postseason officiating has never been the same since. Penalties are much less common in the playoffs than in the regular season, and in the Super Bowl officials practically swallow their whistles. Obviously, if you are a team that won most of your games despite drawing 8-10 penalties per contest, and then in the playoffs you are only getting penalized 2-3 times per contest, that's a huge boost- it's basically a turnover worth of yardage difference. It doesn't surprise me that the two teams who made a SB run were among the most penalized in the regular season.

 

[sc85sis]

Just noticed there's already another thread on this topic.
viewtopic.php?t=71289

 

[The Radish]

Thanks for noticing the other post.