Cal Tops the Nation in Most Penalty Yards, but Does It Matter?

Cal has been assessed more penalty yardage than any other team in the country.  It’s not a football statistic Cal is proud of.

But does it really matter?

There is virtually no correlation between how much a team is penalized and its win-loss record.

Cal has been penalized 57 times for 538 yards, which is 11 yards more than the FBS team with the second-most penalty yards, Texas San Antonio.

It looks bad, but consider where other teams land in the penalty rankings.

Second-ranked Notre Dame and No. 5 Indiana rank among the top five least penalized teams, but Rutgers is the least penalized team in the country and the Scarlet Knights are 1-4. 

Louisiana-Monroe (0-5), Temple (2-4) and Navy (2-3) are also in the top 10 of least penalized teams.

At the other end Old Dominio (2-5) and Kennesaw State (1-5) are among the 10 most penalized teams but so are Texas-San Antonio (5-1), Liberty (5-1), and 21st-ranked Wake Forest, which is 5-1 and faces Cal (3-3) in Berkeley Saturday night.

Penalties are often explained as a lack of discipline, but the facts don’t bear that out.

Top-ranked Georgia ranks 56th on the list of fewest penalties, third-ranked Miami is 43rd, and No. 4 Ohio State is 61st among the 138 FBS schools. They're just sort of in the middle.

“Implementing course of action,” Cal coach Tosh Lupoi said this week in response to the Bears’ many penalties.

“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We’re participating in the highest penalized conference in America.”

Indeed ACC officials seem to be calling more penalties than officials from other conferences. Eleven ACC schools are among the bottom 37 percent in the country in the fewest-penalties rankings.

Lupoi says he is addressing each type of penalty, not the issue in general.

“I’m doing everything I can to coach it better,” Lupoi said, “as far as, you take every single penalty for a life of its own. There’s no general speaking. There’s no, ‘That’s 10 penalties; that’s a lack of discipline.’ We’re going to attack every single one of them. So you break down.”

He noted that Cal has addressed the defensive offside penalty that hurt the Bears earlier in the season. And he looks at different types of penalties via film work.  If he doesn’t see a penalty, “Then I have nothing to coach.” He said. “That’s not a complaint; I just have nothing to coach.”

A lot was made of the Bears’ 16 penalties for 152 yards in the loss to UNLV, but we didn’t hear much about Cal’s 10 penalties for 99 yards in the Bears’ best win of the season, a 25-20 victory over Virginia Tech last week.

Cal has been penalized about the same amount in its three wins (260 yards) as its three losses (272 yards).

Of course, people remember penalties that occur at a critical point in a game and negate a pivotal play, especially late in a game. So it is sometimes true that a given penalty can affect the outcome.

However, penalty yardage in general is not an indicator of how good the team is. Why that’s the case is a subject for a different discussion.

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