Alabama By the Numbers: Penalties

Or rather, inexperience, complicates the question on penalties from lack of discipline. I’ll bet you that if you did go through the Bama 2010 season penalty by penalty, you’ll find that the vast majority of them were committed by relatively younger players, and then by those that were older but had relatively little playing time.

That is indirectly a discipline issue, in that it is a learned skill. But it will make a difference in the totals for the team if this discipline is learned, versus some teams I have seen where it apparently is not.

First off, the use of the word “bloviate” makes me smile. Just so you know.

Here’s the question: Do the aggregate number of penalties matter? Matt explored this here (among other places): http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Florida-celebration-backfiring-on-Georgia-by-spa?urn=ncaaf-115401
Essentially, his argument is that it’s an issue of timing, not quantity.

I’d argue that the most telling thing about the quantity of flags is that they tend to reflect on the coaching staff. Auburn’s penalty numbers, for example — not just the totals but the types of fouls — were to me indicative of a coaching staff that wasn’t bothering to control its players. The same with LSU and Ole Miss — to me, those are programs whose players obviously don’t think major-distance fouls are much of a big deal. There’s a famous (and possibly apocryphal) story about Coach Bryant telling a player who’d just committed 2 penalties, “You’ll never be good enough to cost us 30 yards!” I wonder if that message is communicated as well in other places.

You are going to have freshman mistakes. Coaching says how long and how severe you are going to have them from a given player. Bad enough coaching, you might still be having them at graduation. Given that overall team experience moves a bit, it might be a moving target. There might even be more penalties in certain positions than others, thus making inexperience more felt at times. But coaching will mean that the average will be favorable compared to your peers, at the margins.

Was it Saban that said early in his Bama tenure that if he was going to have freshman mistakes, it would be freshman making them? Or have I got that confused with an earlier coach? I took that very much to intend a focus on learned discipline paying off over time, even at the expense of now.