Bad Officiating

This is a ‘thought experiment’. It is not based on empirical evidence. What I know is that inevitably coaches will blame losses on the quality of officiating rather than the performance of the team and coach.

I’ll make some assumptions though:

1. Officials are doing their best, regardless of their skill level.

2. Officials will be consistent/regress to the mean within a level (school, whatnot)

3. MLB umpires are right 99%+ of the time according to metrics. The NBA and NFL make the same argument. If that’s true in other sports, I’m going to use that as a guideline for officials in volleyball.

4. For the sake of a round number while working through this, I’m going to assume there are 160 points scored per match. I’m going to presume an ace rate of 10% and a service-error rate of 10% as well.

Okay–so now…how about this theoretical quantification of ‘bad’ calls.

If we’ve got 160 points and 20% are A/SE, then there are 128 balls that are kept in play for multiple contacts. For an average play, you get serve-pass-set-hit-dig-pass-kill. Some rallies go longer. Some are FBSO. I get that.

So if officials are judging all contacts, we’ve got about 930 contacts in a match. You know what, let’s just up that to 1,000.

If we presume 99% accuracy–that means an officiating crew makes the wrong choice on 10 contacts/terminal balls per match. (Coaches focus on those 10 rather than the 990 correct….) 10 errors over four sets is 2.5 mistakes/set.

But how many of these mistakes are actually significant? Many judgment calls are to ‘play on’ rather than call a violation–what’s the percentage of those plays which score? 50%? So now we really only have 1.25 mistakes/set that can make a difference.

Many of these mistakes aren’t occurring when the game is +/- 2. They are occurring in blowouts (margin of more than 5)–the natural decision to let people play rather than stop action in a mismatch.

Going through stats over the course of a three-year period, about 1/4th of our sets wound up decided by 2 or 3 points. So those ‘mistakes’ are generally irrelevant in 80% of the sets right out of the gate–at least…because while we can average errors across sets by refs, etc, that’s not really how it works (I know that). I THINK there are more ‘mistakes’ in blowout sets.

*** So an official’s mistake is possibly important 20% of the time. We’ve got 1.25 mistake/set and it’s a wash.

I think then it’s as much about bad memory as anything else. It’s like people claiming a team has momentum and remembering a massive comeback–providing the existence of momentum. We remember the comeback but not the 50+ other times we lost after trailing by 8-9 in a set. Officials calls–we remember the missed calls at critical moments.

*Don Denkinger in the World Series *Galarraga’s lost perfect game *Hue Hollins’ calls in Bulls-Knicks mid 90s. *The blown pass interference calls Lions-Cowboys(2015) and Saints-Rams (2019).

Do you remember any other calls from those games? Officials’ mistakes are remembered because they rarely determine a contest.

Get it? But do you remember all the times they got the call right? Exactly–we don’t think about those because we expect correct calls as necessary–and we know that many plays, the call didn’t have a material effect on the play if the ref made a no-call–play will continue and the ‘right’ team will still win at least 50% of the time.

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*** I’ve spent 25 years as a head coach. Include time coaching club and that’s about 1,500 matches. During that time, the # of matches decided by poor officiating. HS = 1996-2003, College = 2004-2021:

1996: 1. Official’s initials were BM. 1997: Zero. 1998-2000: 1 each year. The official’s initials were BM for each match. She was so egregious with the last one, she never officiated again. (She intentionally made calls against male coaches. Really.) 2001-2002: Zero. 2003: 1. Official forgot serves were permitted to hit the net. Inadvertent whistle. Replay–but during replay permitted the other team to substitute. Substitute then got the set-winning kill. 2004-2008: None. 2009: 1. …the ref made two “doubles” calls on first contacts. I said nothing the first time, got upset the second–and when she argued she could call it, I said I was going to protest. The R2 told her I was correct. After that, she would smile and call a lift instead…and only on our team. 2010: #1 – Wasn’t just a bad call–was a homer-job. Lost in 5. When the match was over, the R1 came down, hugged the other coach and players and asked the coach to let her know when they knew who they’d face in the post-season…so she could come and cheer them on. 2010: #2 – R1 made a call (I have forgotten what it was now) at 20-20 in the 4th set. Good official, had a bad day. After the day was over, came up and apologized for the call and his day–felt guilty for us losing. I noted to him he wasn’t the one to miss multiple serves or let a freeball drop unattended in the 5th set. [My mood was not helped because of the previous day’s match…which is #1 above this…so an argument could be made that #2 here may not even belong on a list like this in the first place.] 2011: None 2012: 1. Other team used the n-word thru the net at one of my players…5th set at Nationals. Right in front of the R2 (and me). R2 said he wasn’t going to get involved because taking actiont could decide the match. (It did decide the match anyways–because my player was crying from it…I shouldn’t have backed down…that’s a ‘my bad’ on me, too) 2012 club: 1. Official ruled that a player who blocked a freeball when it came over the net couldn’t play it a second time because a freeball isn’t an attack, thus a block isn’t possible. 2013: 1. R1 called multiple contacts at 23-24 on a ball fisted one-hand over (had no visual angle). R2 tried to explain but R1 said ‘my judgment’ and that was that. 2014-17: None. 2018: 1 In 5th set, the R1 ruled an overlap because a ‘libero can never be in front of a back row setter‘. Made the call at 12-13. 2019-2021: None. 2022: A list wouldn’t matter. There were five on the season–I think this has to do with a shortage of quality officials growing worse. Three were just whiffs. Two were lack of knowledge on the parts of the ref.

So…over 1,500 matches, somewhere around 4,000 sets–an official’s call has decided 16 of them. If we remove “BM”, that drops to 13…six high school, one club, six college. For the six college matches, here are our unforced errors/set…excluding BHE calls (since we’re questioning officials here):

2009: 9.25/set 2010#1: 7.2/set 2010#2: 8.2/set 2012: 7.2/set 2013: 8.33/set 2018: 7.8/set

Under 8 errors/set is the point where you’ll win 99%-ish of the time. That means only *three* of those matches were probably actually affected. One was an openly biased official (2010 #1). One was not about technical calls but unsporstmanlike behavior (2012), and the other was a R1 who got chewed by the region supervisor after the match was concluded (2018)

Three matches out of 1,500+. That’s 0.2% of the time. 99.8% of the time, those matches went as they should based on the talent the two teams brought to the court that day. Not all of these are my team with the bad call (the ‘I’ comments are a bit of a giveaway for the ones affecting my team…)

So as a conclusion–spend 99.8% of your time worrying about your team and the opponent’s, not complaining about officials.