[teamdonkey]

[ QUOTE ]
plus, Sheed is black.

[/ QUOTE ]

i know you're kidding, but it's not whether black players get more technicals, rather if white refs are more apt to call them than black refs.

[ QUOTE ]
Was position taken into account? Don't centers commit more fouls than other positions typically? And aren't centers taller than other players, typically? If a high number of centers are black that would explain part of the discrepency wouldn't it?

[/ QUOTE ]

they have a monsterous data set (267,000 games, and however many fouls that includes) so they were able to factor in a bunch of things like that. Things like position, if they're a rookie or all-star, if they only play a few minutes a game and possibly are in there to foul hack-a-shaq style, if their team is in playoff contention, if they're at home or away, etc. The end result with or without these factors was pretty much the same.

Just finished it, and i'm really not the best person to critique it, but some more thoughts:

-these guys do a good job of crunching numbers but a poor job of drawing conclusions. It's obvious they don't follow basketball and have a difficult time applying their results to what happens in a game.

-I don't have a statistical background so i can't talk with confidence about their methods, but they seem to come up with the same basic answer with several different approaches. In science this usually means their premise (there is some bias by opposite-race referees) has some merit.

-IMO, they find 2 big things: (1) white refs call fewer fouls on white players than black refs do. (2) whiter teams win more often with white refs than they do with black refs. Because referee crews are mostly white, this benefits teams that play more white players.

the problem is, they can't say (1) causes (2). The actual amount of fewer fouls called by white referees is tiny and shouldn't by itself be a big deal. However the actual change in winning % for whiter teams is significant. They spend a decent chunk of the paper trying to explain how (1) causes (2), and fail IMO. I don't have an answer for this either.

an interesting thing to note: this difference isn't what you'd immediately think, it isn't evil white refs calling poor black victems for more fouls... all refs call fouls on black players at about the same rate. It's the rate of fouls on white players that changes. There's also no real way to tell which ref group is discriminating: white refs might be calling fewer fouls than they should, black refs might be calling more, or somewhere in between.