Super Bowl Penalties

The referees in this year’s Super Bowl tried their best to take the game away from the players and they almost succeeded. While Pittsburgh’s 27-24 win over the Arizona Cardinals was one of the most exciting championship games ever played, it might remain more noted for the quantity and quality of the referees’ calls.

Give Ben Roethlisberger all due credit for bringing the Steelers from behind in the last two minutes for the win and Arizona’s Kurt Warner for leading a fourteen-point fourth-quarter comeback to put his team ahead. But let’s look at the role the zebras played.

In the ten previous Super Bowls played, there was an average of twelve penalties called and ninety-yards assessed per contest. This year there were eighteen accepted penalties, two more penalties that were declined, and one-hundred and ninety-yards walked off. The penalty yardage would’ve been even greater but a fifteen-yard unnecessary roughness call against the Steelers’ James Harrison had only a one-yard consequence because it was a half-the-distance to the goal-line penalty. The only Super Bowl with more penalties was the brawl between New England and Carolina in 2004 with the Patriots winning, 32-29, when twenty penalties were called.

In addition to the eighteen penalties, two calls were overturned by instant replay and a non-call occurred after the winning touchdown when Santonio Holmes, obviously using the ball as a celebratory prop in violation of NFL rules, was not flagged. Had a fifteen-yard penalty been called, Warner might have had two opportunities for a jump-ball in the end zone from the Pittsburgh twenty-nine with fifteen-seconds left with Larry Fitzgerald going up for a winning rebound. I can think of no one playing in the NFL today better suited in that spot than him.

In the last eleven Super Bowls, the team with more penalties won only 44% of the time, which is about the average of an NFL season (43%). In the collegiate play, that number begins to reverse itself with 52% of teams with more penalties winning the game while in high school an astonishing 67% of the teams with more penalties win the game. (See attendant story on the role of penalties in high school football from a survey done in 2003).

In the Super Bowl, eight of the total of eighteen penalties occurred in the fourth period while only two were called in the opening quarter. The penalties did not appear to determine the winner but proved annoying to the viewing audience, slowing down play and making every snap an adventure. An offensive holding penalty in the end zone against the Steelers negated a first-down completion and resulted in a safety and a Pittsburgh scoring drive was kept alive by three Arizona penalties, two of which were viewed as questionable by John Madden.

My research does not show when the bulk of the penalties of other Super Bowl games took place but eight in the final twelve-minutes seems to suggest the refs were more concerned with missing a call than letting the players play.

This article was written by Jim Reese. Jim also wrote Penalties and their impact on High School Football Game Results which also appears on this web site.

Jim was a quarterback and assistant coach at the University of Minnesota and is now retired and lives in Tampa, Florida, where he reports on sports for a local newspaper.

Learn about and download Jim’s eBook, How to Win at Flag Football