Scorecasting (5 page)

But is this omission bias, or is it just that players are committing fewer fouls, turnovers, and mistakes when the game gets tight, and so referees have fewer calls to make? If we look at calls for which officials don’t have much discretion, such as lost balls out of bounds (they have to call
something
), kicked balls, and shot clock violations, they occur at the same rate in the fourth quarter and overtime as they do throughout the game. In other words, players seem to be playing no more conservatively when the game is close and near the end.

One of our favorite examples of ref omission bias occurred in the championship game of the 1993 NCAA tournament, when Michigan’s renowned Fab Five team played North Carolina. With
18 seconds to play and North Carolina leading by two points, Michigan star
Chris Webber grabbed a defensive rebound and took three loping steps without dribbling. It was the kind of flagrant traveling violation that would have been cited in a church league game, but a referee standing just a few feet from Webber … did nothing. It was a classic case of swallowing the whistle. A traveling call would have doused the drama in the game. By overlooking Webber’s transgression and declining to make a subjective call, the ref enabled the game to build to a dramatic climax. The no-call enraged
Dean Smith, Carolina’s venerable coach, who stormed down the court in protest.
Billy Packer, the CBS commentator, was also apoplectic. “Oh, he walked!” Packer screamed. “[Webber] walked and the referee missed it!”

You might recall what happened next. Webber dribbled the length of the court. Then, inexplicably, he stopped dribbling and called time-out. Alas, Michigan had no time-outs left. Unlike a traveling violation, when a player motions for a time-out and his team has exhausted its ration, well, that’s not a judgment call. That’s a call an official
has
to make even in the waning seconds of an exhilarating championship game. And the officials did: technical foul. North Carolina wins.

In the NFL, more subjective calls (holding, illegal blocks, illegal contact, and unnecessary roughness) fall precipitously as the game nears the end and the score is close. But more objective calls (delay of game or illegal formation, motion, and shifts) are called at the same rate regardless of what the clock or scoreboard shows. The same is true in the NHL. More subjective calls (boarding, cross-checking, holding, hooking, interference) are called far less frequently at the end of tight games, but objective calls (delay of game, too many men on the ice) occur with similar frequency regardless of the game situation. We also find that in the NHL penalty minutes per penalty are lower late in the game. Referees have discretion over whether to call a major or a minor penalty—which dictates the number of minutes a player has to remain in the penalty box—and they are more reluctant to dispense more penalty minutes at the end of a tight game.

A European colleague snickered to us, “You wouldn’t see this in
soccer.” But we did. We looked at 15 years of matches in the English Premier, the Spanish La Liga, and the Italian Serie A leagues. European officials are no better at overcoming omission bias than their American counterparts. Fouls, offsides, and free kicks diminish significantly as close matches draw to a close.

But refs aren’t entirely to blame. As fans, we’ve come to expect a certain degree of omission bias, so much so that even the
right
call can be what the rules would suggest is the wrong call.
Walt Coleman is the sixth-generation owner of Arkansas’s Coleman Dairy, the largest dairy west of the Mississippi River. He is also an NFL official. (We told you these guys were exceptional.) Late in a 2002 playoff game between the Patriots and the Raiders, New England quarterback Tom Brady was sacked and appeared to fumble. After reviewing the play, Coleman, as referee, overturned the call and declared the pass incomplete, invoking the obscure “tuck rule” (NFL Rule 3, Section 21, Article 2, Note 2), which states:

The Patriots retained possession, scored a field goal on the final play of regulation, and won in overtime. Technically, Coleman appears to have made the correct call, but to many fans it didn’t feel right to have an official insinuating himself into the game and going deep into an obscure part of the rule book at such a critical time. A decade later, the “tuck rule game” persists as one of the most controversial moments in NFL history. The “Tyree Catch,”
on the other hand, is hardly famous for its controversy. And the NFL’s reaction was telling, too. The league did not offer Coleman up for a media tour the way they did Mike Carey.

For an even more vivid illustration of how fans and athletes expect officials to remove themselves during the key moments of sports contests, consider what happened at the 2009 U.S. Open
tennis tournament. In the women’s semifinal,
Serena Williams, the 2008 defending champion, faced
Kim Clijsters, a former top-ranked player from Belgium who’d retired from tennis to get married and start a family but had recently returned to make a spirited comeback. Although the draw sheet indicated that this was a semifinal match, the fans knew that it was the de facto final, pitting the two best players left in the tournament against each other. That Clijsters had beaten Serena’s sister, Venus, a few rounds earlier infused the match with an additional layer of drama.

This was the rare sporting event that lived up to the considerable buildup. Points were hard fought. Momentum swung back and forth. As powerful as she was accurate, Clijsters won the first set 6–4. At 5–6 in the second set, Williams was serving to stay in the match. It was, as the cliché-prone might say, “crunch time.” Clijsters won the first point. Williams won the next. Then Clijsters won a point to go up 15–30.

Two points from defeat, Williams rocked back and belted a first serve that landed a foot or so wide of the service box. The nervous crowd sighed. Williams bounced the ball in frustration and prepared to serve. After she struck her second serve but before the ball landed, the voice of a compactly built Japanese lineswoman,
Shino Tsurubuchi, pierced the air:
“Foot fault!”

Come again? A foot fault is a fairly obscure tennis rule dictating that no part of the server’s foot touch—or trespass—the baseline before the ball is struck. (Imagine a basketball player stepping on the baseline while inbounding the ball.) Players can go weeks or even months without being cited for a foot fault violation. In this case, the violation was hardly blatant, but replays would confirm that it was legitimately a foot fault.

Williams lost the point as a result. The score was now 15–40, with Clijsters only a point from winning the game—and the match. As the crowd groaned, Williams paused to collect herself. Or so it seemed. Instead, she stalked over to Tsurubuchi, who was seated to the side of the court in, ironically, a director’s chair. Then, in a ten-second monologue, Serena splintered whatever remained of tennis’s facade as a prissy, genteel country club pursuit. Glowering and raising her racket with one hand and pointing a finger with the other, Serena barked: “You better be f—ing right! You don’t f—ing know me! … If I could, I would take this f—ing ball and shove it down your f—ing throat!”

Having already been assessed a penalty for smashing her racket earlier in the match, Williams was docked a point. Since the foot fault had made the score 15–40, with the docked point the game and match were over. Bedlam ensued. Confused fans, shocked by the sudden end to the match, jeered and booed. Williams marched to the net, where officials were summiting, and protested. Slamming her racket, she walked over to Clijsters’s side of the net, shook hands with her opponent, and then left the court. The blogosphere exploded. The “terrible tennis tirade” became a lead segment on CNN and front-page news internationally, the defining moment of the entire tournament.

Part of what made the episode so memorable was the kind of outrageous tirade one associates less with tennis than with, say, cage fighting. But it was also jarring to see an official essentially decide what had been a close, hard-fought contest between two worthy competitors. And in many corners, fans’ outrage was directed at the official. How could the match be decided this way? We’ve come to expect omission bias in close contests.
Swallow the whistle!

But wait, you say; the official didn’t determine the outcome. Serena Williams did by her tirade, violating the rules. The lineswoman was simply doing her job. And if she had turned a blind eye to the violation, wouldn’t she have been robbing Clijsters? Try telling that to
John McEnroe. Commentating from the CBS
broadcast booth that night, he remarked immediately: “You can’t call that there! Not at that point in the match.” One former NBA ref had the same reaction as he watched from his home. “Great feel for the match,” he sarcastically texted a friend.
Bruce Jenkins, a fine columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, wrote, “[Tsurubuchi] managed to ruin the tournament … any sports fan knows you don’t call a ticky-tack violation when everything is on the line.”

A few weeks after Serena’s Vesuvian eruption,
Sports Illustrated
readers voted her Female Athlete of the Decade, suggesting that the episode had done little to hurt her image. Tsurubuchi was less fortunate. She was hurriedly escorted from the stadium and flown back to Japan the next day. When we first attempted to interview her, we were told she was off-limits to the media. In fact, tennis officials wouldn’t even disclose her name or confirm it when we learned it from other sources. (Compare this to the treatment Mike Carey received from the NFL after Super Bowl XLII.) Never mind that she made the correct call and didn’t give in to omission bias. In effect, she was shamed for being right.

A full five months later, we finally caught up with Tsurubuchi at a small men’s tennis event in Delray Beach, Florida, where she was working in anonymity. She cut a dignified, reserved figure, disappointed to have been recognized but too polite to decline a request to talk. Conversing with this reticent, petite woman—she looks to be about four foot eight—it was hard not to think of what calamity might have ensued if Serena Williams actually had acted on her threat that night. Her voice quivering as if on a vibrate setting as she recalled the incident that brought her unwanted fame, Tsurubuchi claimed that she’d had no choice. “I wish—I pray—for players: ‘Please don’t touch that line!’ ” she explained in halting English. “But if players [do], we have to make the call.”

Would she make the same call again? “Yes,” she said, looking dumbfounded. “It’s tough and the players might not be happy … but the rules are the rules, no matter what.”

Her call—her resistance to the omission bias to which we’ve
become accustomed in sports and in life—may have earned her widespread ridicule and disapproval, but she also won fans that night, including Mike Carey: “Making the hard call or the unpopular call, that’s where guts are tested, that’s the mark of a true official,” he says. “You might have a longer career as an official if you back off. But you won’t have a more accurate career.”

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