A common criticism of Stefanski's Browns has been that the team commits a lot of procedural penalties.

I wanted to take a look at that.

One thing that seemed to emerge as I was poking around at penalty data was a correlation between roster variation or personnel usage and the number of procedural penalties.

So here is a chart with a composite measure of "offensive roster uniqueness" (basically just the number of unique offensive players listed in the play-by-play, normalized) vs. the number of offensive pre-snap penalties.

Depending on which penalties are included, the R-squared is somewhere in the 0.36 to 0.41 range. This includes all offensive pre-snap penalties I'm aware of and the R-squared is about 0.375, which is moderately correlated but obviously not the sole factor.

12 comments

  2. Have to account for share of replacements. Bc when you have to field and entire OL of backups and cashiers, pens are bound to happen

  3. Are you looking at uniqueness as a function of formation or personnel? Because both matter imo.

    A team can have multiple formation looks but consistent personnel.

  6. It’s almost like the NFL uses the officials to help “good” teams and hurt “bad” teams

  7. A straight line across the bottom and almost another across the right side strikes me as the type of correlation that’s likely to be an accident or coincidence rather than any actual meaningful correlation here.

  8. Are you creating these graphs yourself or are you using a website to generate these for you based on data that is already on the website? If so I’d be interested to know what site that is

  9. I see both CLE/MIN are practically the same in terms of amount of penalties called. Stefanski/O’Connell are from the same tree with similar offenses and this is a common trait among both their teams.

    We know their systems (when functioning as intended) use a lot of pre-snap motion, misdirection and unique formations–which is likely the root cause. Its a hard offense to grasp with a lot going on to disguise and confuse the defense.

    Add in the fact that you have had 198 different OL combinations in the past 2 years and a offense with constant shuffling at WR, 5 different QBs, a new TE and RB room….you get a lot of penalties.

    The funny part is when he does ‘dumb it down’ to accommodate the rookie QBs, fans bitch that the offense is predictable and boring.

  10. Is there any measure for play complexity? As in things like number of guys going into motion, number of players shifting per play, how often ol pull. Things that require players to do a lot before a snap? I feel like if you had a mix of high roster variation and complex playbooks, you’d be highly likely to have pre snap penalties. The rams are interesting . They been relatively healthy this year and run a pretty simple offense. Alot of 12 and 13 personnel, mostly under center and it’s run first offense that works off of play action to Adams or puka. Whereas the bears run a lot more mixed personnel and you know Ben Johnson likes to get a little weird with formations.

  12. Based on the graph, it looks like high pre-snap penalties correlates with being a bad football team.

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