The Jets and Cardinals played an ugly, penalty-filled game on Monday night, but the third team on the field deserves some of the scrutiny for all of those penalties as well.
Referee Jerome Boger and his crew call an average of 20.8 penalties per game, according to ESPN. That’s the highest average of any officiating crew in the NFL.
Penalties in the NFL are subjective enough that there’s a significant discrepancy in the number of penalties called per game from one crew to the next. Boger’s crew calls almost two penalties per game more than any other crew, while the crew of Walt Coleman, which calls the fewest penalties per game in the NFL, averages just 12.2 a game -- more than eight penalties per game fewer than Boger’s crew.
Officials are human, and two officials can look at the same play and disagree about whether to call a penalty. But it would be nice to see more consistency from crew to crew.
And it would be nice to see fewer penalty-filled games like Monday night’s.