099: College basketball referee travel logs
A tiny app to surface the travel schedules of men’s collegiate basketball referees during the 2023-24 season.
NC State beat Wake Forest 83-76 in mid-January earlier this year. The Wolfpack outscored the Demon Deacons 34-18 in the final 10 minutes of the game.
The game itself was bonkers. A combined 50 fouls and 61 free throws.
It gave us the DJ Horne double-middles reprimand and it improved NC State to 5-1 in the ACC for the first time since the 1988-89 season. State would go on to win only four of its next 14 ACC games before it reeled off nine wins in a row en route to the Final Four.
State head coach Kevin Keatts was ejected in the first half. Referee Jeffrey Anderson (known for his high knees) whistled three more technical fouls in the final minute of the game too.
Watch this sequence:
Anderson was ranked the top referee by Ken Pomeroy’s methodology, which means no other referee worked more games between top teams than Anderson did this past season. After all, high knees was on the floor for the National Championship game.
It’s fair to say that the State-Wake debacle wasn’t Jeffrey Anderson’s best performance as an official during the 2023-24 season.
Anderson’s trip to Raleigh, NC came on Tuesday, January 16. It was in the middle of 13 consecutive days of work for Anderson that involved travel across Los Angeles, Reno, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Nashville, Boca Raton, Madison, Iowa City, and Salt Lake City.
Anderson worked 26 games across 25 locations in 31 days in the month of January. Over the course of the 2023-24 season, he worked 99 total games.
High knees has been everywhere. Man.
I’ve long wanted to do something with college basketball referee data. I’ve written about in the past. And while there is a lack of public data, Ken Pomeroy does help provide it and smart people have figured out how to surface it.
The ideal state is something similar to the NFL. For example, you can see a NFL official’s entire game log with penalties.
College sports doesn’t have that level of detail though. I’m also not sure it would render anything all that meaningful.
I remember listening to an old Freddie Kiger interview about he tracked North Carolina games for Dean Smith in the 1970s. Kiger was tasked with tracking every whistle and trying to find if certain refs have specific tendencies. Nothing consequential was found or at least shared publicly.
Of course, an individual ref is also paired with two other refs, which makes it complicated to discern too.
A few weeks ago, Connor (@cobrastats) shared referee data with me and we started noodling on ideas. Connor tried tracking fouls and projecting adjusted fouls for over 5,000 games. We didn’t find anything too notable though.
The obvious data point that did jump out to us was the travel. Connor started tracking the mileage of these referees and the work schedules.
This brought us to building a tiny app to track college basketball referee logs. You can check it out here: https://blessyourchart.shinyapps.io/cbb-ref-logs/
There are three tabs to explore referee travel data:
Data: a summary table for the entire season that tracks the number of games, venues and locations visited, and total estimated mileage
Full schedule: shows an individual ref’s full schedule from November to April, and colors the dates worked by conference affiliation
Individual month: select a ref and a month of the season to see the dates worked for that month, plus the location, game result, and gam number worked on that season.
All in all it looks like this, and it’s best viewed on desktop or landscape mode:
Six referees traveled over 70,000 miles throughout the 2023-24 season. That’s a few trips around the earth.
The same number, but not same individual referees, worked over 100 games this past season too.
Ron Groover worked 31 consecutive days to open the season. A full month from November 6 through December 6.
Kipp Kissinger worked 26 games in 29 days in the month of February.
Collegiate referees are not full-time employees. These people are independent contractors that are free to set their own work schedules.
I’m not sure the average college basketball fan realizes how much these people work and travel in a given month.
And that is the goal of the app. Shine a spotlight of referee travel and surface it with actual data. We’re not trying to tell you who is a good or bad ref, Pomeroy already tries to do that today.
Happy July, and thanks for reading this far.
This was a fun offseason project, check it out here and let us know what you think. Always looking for ways to improve, learn, or make it better.
And please give Connor a follow on Twitter (@cobrastats), he is super talented and puts together lots of clean looking tables and charts like this one.
Enjoy the summer.