I hate to say this, but about 8 years ago I ran out of ideas. However, it’s not my fault. Prior to that I wrote about nearly everything I was interested in. So in lieu of long periods without any content, I thought it would be productive to occasionally revisit some of the old blog posts. For one thing, there’s a lot of good content there and most people haven’t been exposed to it. There’s also plenty of cringy stuff, but that’s kind of the goal of this: Amplify the good work and hope that the regrettable work will be forgotten unless I run for political office.
In the sidebar of the old blog, which has not been touched for years, the first item under “Fun Stuff” is a piece from a decade ago where I used a regression model to tease out which officials called the most and least fouls. The interesting finding was that Ted Valentine, of all people (along with Roger Ayers), stood out as calling the fewest fouls of any officials regularly working D-I games.
The point made then was basically that people are incredibly irrational about officiating. Perhaps even more so about basketball officiating. It’s the most difficult sport to officiate, what with requiring a massive amount of judgment calls in live action. Short of implementing replay for 40 minutes (please no), there will always be tons of mistakes. Fans always say officials suck, and we need better ones, but the better ones don’t exist. It’s a job engineered for failure.
The irrationality peaks with Valentine, who by all accounts is popular among coaches despite being the source of punchlines among media and fans. This SI feature by Seth Davis portrays Valentine as a downright decent guy. Even the controversies section of Valentines’ Wikipedia page only lists three incidents, which across 44 seasons of officiating D-I is probably not that big of a deal.
I’m sure Valentine has an outsized ego. It’s pretty much a necessary qualification if you’re actually going to think you can be successful officiating basketball games. And he certainly has had a few strange moments over the years. But if TV Teddy is solely concerned about his air time, why would he call the fewest fouls of anyone?
It’s been a decade since that post, and improbably, Valentine is still officiating. He famously contemplated retirement after the Joel Berry incident in January 2018. As a result of that gaffe, he was not asked to work a tournament game that season after working the NCAA championship game the previous year. The Big Ten (strangely, not the ACC) ended its relationship with him for the second time in his career. But Valentine has kept on trucking. Last year, at age 65, past the retirement age of most officials, he worked a whopping 76 games, including an NCAA tournament game and a Duke/UNC contest. For whatever reason, important people still trust him in important games.
We might expect people to evolve over a ten-year period, so with both Valentine and Ayers still officiating, I wanted to circle back on the fouling trends of officials. There have been 116 humans who have officiated at least 100 men’s college basketball games (D-I vs. D-I only) over the past two seasons, and these are the officials whose games have had the fewest fouls:
Ted Valentine (30.61 fouls per game)
Roger Ayers (30.760)
Tim Clougherty (30.761)
Lamar Simpson (30.83)
Nathan Farrell (30.98)
There is no dataset available that tells us which officials call each foul in a game. But given that Valentine is consistently involved in games with fewer fouls, and that he’s working with different officials each night, it’s extremely likely the reason there are fewer fouls in games he works is because he tends to call fewer fouls. Or maybe he has some sort of calming influence on his partners. Regardless, he’s somehow having an effect that reduces calls.
The fact that both Valentine and Ayers rank as the officials with the most conservative whistle, just as they did nearly a decade ago, suggests that officials may not change much over their career. (Alas, I should probably should fire up my regression model from that original post and provide foul-calling trends by officials in real-time.)
Obviously, simply calling fewer fouls does not make an official universally admired by those in the sport. But being able to call fewer fouls without games becoming overly-physical seems to be a ticket to success. Both Clougherty and Simpson on that list have also worked Final Four games. (Neither has worked a Final Four. We regret the error.) If you’re a fan of a team in the ACC, Atlantic 10, or CAA (because those are the only leagues Valentine works these days) and you get Teddy assigned to a game this season, expect fewer fouls than usual.
When Valentine decides to hang it up - and if he loves the spotlight as much as people think, we might presume he’ll orchestrate some sort of Jeter-style farewell tour - we’ll lose one of the game’s best at not blowing the whistle. This, in itself, does not make a good official. However, with Valentine, it probably explains some of his popularity among the game’s coaches and evaluators.
And once he’s gone, fans will finally be rid of his occasionally flamboyant calls. But the officials who pick up Valentine’s vacated assignments are guaranteed to call more fouls. The trade-off hardly seems worth it.