BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published December 3, 2009

There is always someone or something to blame for a game that does not go your way.

“It was the field, coach. How can we be expected to play on a field like this?”

“It was the other team. We couldn’t play our game, because they were just playing dirty.”

And when all else fails, there is always one scapegoat you can turn to: the referee. In all sports, at all levels, from peewee football to the NHL, referees are hassled for every bad call and missed play. But is this harassment well placed?
There are plenty of infamous gaffes that make a case for referees deserving their negative image. Anyone who has seen the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal match between the Argentinean and English soccer teams and witnessed Diego Maradona literally punching the ball into the net, an incident that has come to be known as “the hand of God,” has to question whether the officials for the game were blind or just not paying attention.

But there are just as many incidents where referees have been blamed for making the right call. Pittsburg Steelers fans were outraged during the 1998 Thanksgiving Day game against the Detroit Lions when it appeared the referee awarded the overtime coin toss to the wrong team. However, Jerome Bettis, who was calling the toss for the Steelers, seems to have changed his mind halfway through from heads to tails. By NFL rules, the referee was required to use his first choice and give the ball to the other team. Thus it would appear that Steelers fans have been blaming the wrong person for losing the game for all these years (not that the coin toss was the real reason they lost anyway).

Whether they make good or bad calls, or no calls at all, officials are a part of the game on sports. Therefore, like every other aspect of the game, they are studied with painstaking detail. Studies have been done on such wide-ranging topics as the relationship between fitness tests and the match performance of Italian soccer referees, the effects of prior knowledge on officials, and the influence of crowd noise on the calling of fouls in soccer.

However, one 2005 study, recently publicized by the New York Times, might give fans more substantial proof that referees are to blame for their teams’ losses. In a study published in the “Journal of Sports Science,” Kyle J. Anderson and David A. Pierce found that referees attempted to make the number of fouls committed by each team in a match the same. Using games from the 2004-2005 NCAA men’s basketball season, Anderson and Pierce’s results suggest that referees give preferential treatment to the more aggressive teams, since no matter how many fouls they commit, the refs are going to try to make it even by giving the same number to the opposing team.

Anderson and Pierce also found evidence of referees giving preferential treatment to the home team. These results corroborate an earlier study published in “Psychology of Sport and Exercise,” which suggested that it was the crowd that caused this preferential treatment. In the study, Alan Nevill, Nigel Balmer and Mark Williams found that referees awarded significantly fewer fouls against the home team when shown videos of fouls with crowd noise than when they were shown the videos in silence.

Beyond helping the argument that there are significant problems with refereeing, these studies seem to show that referees are human and therefore subject to the same psychological pressures as everyone else and prone to make mistakes like everyone else. Yet sports would not be possible without them. They certainly are not paid enough to make it worthwhile to take so much grief from fans (is there any amount of money that would make it worth losing three teeth and requiring numerous stitches after being assaulted while refereeing a sixth-grade boys’ basketball game?), so you have to think that they referee for the same reason athletes play: for the love of the game. Maybe this should give fans and athletes pause the next time they curse out a referee for making a bad call.

If it does not, then maybe the financial motivation will. Referees seem to be fighting back against the trash-talk they have to endure from players. After his game against the Detroit Pistons last month, the Orlando Magic’s Dwight Howard complained of what he viewed as questionable calls by the referee on an online blog. To his surprise, the NBA fined him $15,000 for doing so. While paying this fine probably is not too hard for an NBA player, it shows that referees do not have to stand by idly as they are abused, either verbally or physically, from fans and players. This is just one more reason why, if you find yourself taken over by the urge to throw your beer at a referee, it might be time to become less involved in whatever sport you are watching.

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