A Decade of Referee Bias against College Football Programs from Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Abstract

The central objective of this investigation was to examine within game penalties that were levied against football programs from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States. Previous scholarship that sets an appropriate background on sports science and culture has revealed that referee bias has occurred in many European sports. It was in the methods section of this scholarship that statistical analyses were discussed in terms of game day penalties that occurred within the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from the 2006 through the 2015 season. The results illustrated that referees penalized football teams from historically black college and universities (HBCUs) significantly more than football teams from predominantly white institutions (PWIs). An interpretation of this quantitative data was subsequently completed and Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT) was appropriately spotlighted in the discussion section of this study in an effort to assign meaning to the analytics of interest.