Jason Campbell Leads the League in Roughing the Passer Penalties at BetLM

Jason Campbell Leads the League in Roughing the Passer Penalties

Michael Vick raised the ques­tion this week about whether ref­er­ees pro­tect cer­tain quar­ter­backs more than oth­ers. It turns out that the quar­ter­back who draws rough­ing the passer penal­ties most fre­quently is not a superstar.

Raiders quar­ter­back Jason Camp­bell has drawn rough­ing the passer penal­ties at a higher rate than any other quar­ter­back in the NFL since the start of the 2010 sea­son, accord­ing to for­mer head of offi­ci­at­ing Mike Pereira, who posted the data at FOXSports.com.

Yes, Al Davis, the offi­cials are pro­tect­ing your quar­ter­back more than any other.

Or maybe not. Actu­ally, the truth is that the data about rough­ing the passer penal­ties doesn’t tell us much about which quar­ter­backs are being pro­tected and which ones are not — or if NFL offi­cials actu­ally “pro­tect” any quar­ter­backs more than any oth­ers. The fact that Camp­bell draws a rough­ing the passer penalty 1.46 times for every 100 passes while Tom Brady draws a rough­ing the passer penalty 0.16 times for every 100 passes prob­a­bly means that Brady is get­ting the ball away before the defense even gets close to him, while Camp­bell is fre­quently throw­ing under intense pres­sure. It would be much more use­ful to ana­lyze penal­ties per hit than penal­ties per pass.

But the data is inter­est­ing nonethe­less. After Camp­bell, the quar­ter­backs who draw the most rough­ing the passer penal­ties are Jay Cut­ler, Colt McCoy, Jimmy Clausen and Sam Brad­ford. In addi­tion to Brady, the quar­ter­backs who draw the fewest rough­ing the passer penal­ties are Eli Man­ning, Matt Schaub, Pey­ton Man­ning, David Gar­rard, Joe Flacco, Kevin Kolb and Tony Romo.

Whether there’s any­thing to glean from that data is open to debate, although Pereira is cer­tainly cor­rect that the star quar­ter­backs don’t appear to pick up rough­ing the passer penal­ties any more than the scrubs.

Or maybe the offi­cials really do go too far to pro­tect Camp­bell. That’s what Rex Ryan thinks.

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