Hopefully someone will find this interesting.
In light of some claims about a particular team having a worse win record with a particular referee than their average and me having a day off, I looked at the actual numbers.
My hypothesis: Games refereed by "better" officials are closer than the average, and top flight sides will have a lower win ratio with top flight referees.
For my (not terribly rigorous) analysis:
I took all of Ireland's results since the last World Cup, who was in the middle, and what the competition was.
I divided the referees into three groups according to (my perception of their) ability: T1: Garces, Owens, Barnes; T2: Gardner, Poite, Peyper, O'Keefe; T3: everyone else.
I divided the opposition into three tiers based on today's rankings: T1 is 1-8, T2 is 9-20, T3 is Canada
This is what I found:
* Overall win ratio: 68.75%
* Win ratio with a T1 referee: 77.78% (7/9 games)
* Win ratio with a T3 referee: 76.92%
* Mean margin of victory/defeat: 14.65 points
* Mean margin with a T1 referee: 11.78 points
* Only one game against a non T1 opponent was refereed by a T1 referee (Owens for Italy this Autumn). If this game is excluded when calculating mean margins with a T1 referee, this number drops to 7.38 points.
* Mean margin with a T3 referee: 13.69 points
* Of the 9 games refereed by a T1 referee, 6 of them were in the Six Nations
* The four largest margins were all against Italy, the fifth was against South Africa, all bar one refereed by a T2 referee.
Not conclusive, but suggests by hypothesis was off - at least the winning margin. The referee rankings are subjective, but Ireland actually lost both their games refereed by Peyper and 2/3 refereed by Poite in this time, so changing the referee tiering would be significant.
In light of some claims about a particular team having a worse win record with a particular referee than their average and me having a day off, I looked at the actual numbers.
My hypothesis: Games refereed by "better" officials are closer than the average, and top flight sides will have a lower win ratio with top flight referees.
For my (not terribly rigorous) analysis:
I took all of Ireland's results since the last World Cup, who was in the middle, and what the competition was.
I divided the referees into three groups according to (my perception of their) ability: T1: Garces, Owens, Barnes; T2: Gardner, Poite, Peyper, O'Keefe; T3: everyone else.
I divided the opposition into three tiers based on today's rankings: T1 is 1-8, T2 is 9-20, T3 is Canada
This is what I found:
* Overall win ratio: 68.75%
* Win ratio with a T1 referee: 77.78% (7/9 games)
* Win ratio with a T3 referee: 76.92%
* Mean margin of victory/defeat: 14.65 points
* Mean margin with a T1 referee: 11.78 points
* Only one game against a non T1 opponent was refereed by a T1 referee (Owens for Italy this Autumn). If this game is excluded when calculating mean margins with a T1 referee, this number drops to 7.38 points.
* Mean margin with a T3 referee: 13.69 points
* Of the 9 games refereed by a T1 referee, 6 of them were in the Six Nations
* The four largest margins were all against Italy, the fifth was against South Africa, all bar one refereed by a T2 referee.
Not conclusive, but suggests by hypothesis was off - at least the winning margin. The referee rankings are subjective, but Ireland actually lost both their games refereed by Peyper and 2/3 refereed by Poite in this time, so changing the referee tiering would be significant.