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[QUOTE="Eric15, post: 2916330, member: 676"]
If you polled every single sports fan in America, and asked them on a very superficial/emotional level "does your team receive a disproportionately negative number of officiating calls?" I'm guessing you will get an overwhelmingly number of "yes" responses. Powerful teams probably think they're targeted by refs because they're powerful, and weaker teams think powerful teams are given preferential treatment. And there's nothing wrong with that. Complaining about officiating is one of the basic elements of sports fandom and it's how fans bond with each other.

But if you wanted to answer the question in an actually meaningful way (which is way more interesting than "eye tests"), you have to dig way deeper. I'm not sure if any scholarly research on this has ever been done, but a question like, "Does Duke get an unfair number of officiating calls?" is a very complicated question. You would have to look at every game they have played in the last 30-40 years, figure out what the normal standard deviation of how many more calls a team potentially gets per game because they're simply more talented/experienced to begin with, and control for all sorts of variables like home vs. away, the officials calling the game, ACC vs. non-ACC refs, rivalry vs. non-rivalry games, tourney vs. non-tourney, etc.
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