Pt. 2

Last article we looked at Warren Sharp and Kristin Tanis assertion that, according to Tanis, the NFL is going out of it’s way to fuck the Bears over. They assertively postulated that the what exists, with no discussion on a possible why. They hate the McCaskeys? They are angry about the team not going to the Ryan family? Nobody is talking about what would be a massive scandal for the NFL, that they conspired to shit on a major market and a very popular team and keep them down. 

So, what’s going on? Because the net effect of this chum in the water is that it exonerates the McCaskey family for years of utter incompetence as owners. In the week that followed Floose’s Thanksgiving Day meltdown, people like Colin Cowerd let the veil slip and said what Chicagoans have known for years – Ditka was right. The McCaskeys suck. They hired shit coaches, shit staff. Jeff spent years talking about what a viper pit that Halas Hall was. Because it was all true. 

Saying the NFL hates the Bears feels very propaganda, it feels like a few low life journos on the interwebz just throw that into the water and give Ginny and her boys a great big pass. So that’s my take. But, in order to really push this nonsense off, we are going to go down the Neil DeGrasse Tyson MasterClass path and teach a bit about critical thinking. And that’s to say, give what you may think is bullshit a full shrift. 

Last article I calculated the SD, Mean, z-score, p-score and looked at the bias, and found what I thought may be reasonable explanations why the Bears opponents don’t get as many penalties as other teams. Why they are always last in opponent yards flagged. Is the fix in? The refs are told, “yeah dude, if a team is playing the Bears, let them get away with some shit. Let them hold, don’t flag them for false starts, just let them go so that the Bears get fucked.” And we found that over the life of the thing, the Bears are down about a single flag, a 10 yard penalty. Had one more flag been called per game across 4 seasons, this would not be a conversation. But that’s enough to look at it, and the data there – at the aggregate level, says wow – Bears suck at drawing penalties, but to really really know if this is a thing the refs are told to do, it helps to know if it was all the krews or just some. And that takes work from nflpenalties.com.

So, to rise to the metaphor, we have spears in our back and two yellow barrels pulling us up, but we have no choice – if we are gonna kill the crew of the Orca we gotta submerge, we gotta go deep. 

Bears 2025 game-level data with crews:

_{^{Wk   Opp       Crew               Agst  Benef   Net
W1   vs MIN    Alan Eck            127     50   -77
W2   @ DET     Land Clark           50     28   -22
W3   vs DAL    Clay Martin          41     25   -16
W4   @ LV      Adrian Hill          60     36   -24
W6   @ WAS     Alex Moore           84     40   -44
W7   vs NO     Scott Novak          92     30   -62
W8   @ BAL     Shawn Smith          79     45   -34
W9   @ CIN     Clete Blakeman       43     49    +6
W10  vs NYG    Adrian Hill          25     69   +44
W11  @ MIN     Brad Rogers          40     15   -25
W12  vs PIT    John Hussey          83     41   -42
W13  @ PHI     Carl Cheffers        35     44    +9
W14  @ GB      Craig Wrolstad       17     55   +38
W15  vs CLE    Ron Torbert          25     21    -4
W16  vs GB     Alex Kemp           105     40   -65
W17  @ SF      Alex Moore           39     55   +16
W18  vs DET    Brad Rogers          25     35   +10
WC   vs GB     Adrian Hill           5     65   +60
Div  vs LAR    Shawn Hochuli        24      5   -19
                                   999    748  -251}}

Aggregated to 15 distinct crews:
_{^{Crew              G    Net   Net/g
Alan Eck          1   -77   -77.0
Alex Kemp         1   -65   -65.0
Scott Novak       1   -62   -62.0
John Hussey       1   -42   -42.0
Shawn Smith       1   -34   -34.0
Land Clark        1   -22   -22.0
Shawn Hochuli     1   -19   -19.0
Clay Martin       1   -16   -16.0
Alex Moore        2   -28   -14.0
Brad Rogers       2   -15    -7.5
Ron Torbert       1    -4    -4.0
Clete Blakeman    1    +6    +6.0
Carl Cheffers     1    +9    +9.0
Craig Wrolstad    1   +38   +38.0
Adrian Hill       3   +80   +26.7}}

What the breakdown actually tells you:

The Bears were net negative under 11 of 15 crews. Sign test under H0 of 50/50 per crew: one-sided p = 0.059. Game-level (12 of 19 negative): p = 0.18. Borderline at the crew level, not significant at the game level.

The pattern is spread across crews rather than concentrated, which is the bias-consistent shape — but with the obvious problem that 12 of the 15 crews only worked a single Bears game, so each “data point” is one game’s noise. You cannot distinguish “Alan Eck has it in for Chicago” from “Week 1 was just a flag-fest” with n=1.

The most interesting signal cuts the other direction: Adrian Hill worked three Bears games (W4, W10, Wild Card vs GB) and his crew was hugely positive for Chicago — net +80 yards, averaging +27/game. If the league were systematically tilted against Chicago, you’d expect no crew to swing that positive over three games. That single data point is enough to make a “uniform anti-Bears bias” hypothesis hard to defend; it shifts the explanation toward “specific crews have specific tendencies that happened to disfavor Chicago in 2025.” Which is a much weaker claim and frankly an unfalsifiable one without crew-level data across many seasons. We must leave the n=1 noise floor, like Jaws must jam his nose into the wooden planks of the Orca despite the pain. We have found a crew in 2025 that cut Bears-positive. Maybe he didn’t get the memo. Maybe he’s secretly born in Joliet. 

Does not matter. If Adrian Hill stays positive for the Bears across all four seasons and Alan Eck stays negative, you’ve got something real and specific. If everyone regresses to the mean across years, the 2025 spread was just variance and the cumulative Bears deficit needs a different explanation.

Cumulative crew-level net (Beneficiary minus Against), Bears 2022–2025:
_{^{Crew              G    Agst   Benef    Net   Net/g    Years
Alex Kemp         2     181      64   -117   -58.5    23,25
Scott Novak       5     282     105   -177   -35.4    22-25
Alan Eck          3     237     144    -93   -31.0    23-25
Ron Torbert       4     218      95   -123   -30.8    22-25
John Hussey       4     221     110   -111   -27.8    22-25
Shawn Smith       2     134      95    -39   -19.5    24,25
Brad Rogers       6     277     175   -102   -17.0    22-25
Tra Blake         3     137      90    -47   -15.7    22-24
Clay Martin       5     300     229    -71   -14.2    22-25
Alex Moore        2     123      95    -28   -14.0    25
Clete Blakeman    5     249     204    -45    -9.0    22-25
Land Clark        4     221     198    -23    -5.8    22,24,25
Carl Cheffers     6     249     230    -19    -3.2    22-25
Bill Vinovich     2      78      79     +1    +0.5    23,24
Shawn Hochuli     2      64      75    +11    +5.5    22,25
Adrian Hill       7     261     341    +80   +11.4    22-25
Craig Wrolstad    3     128     170    +42   +14.0    22,23,25
Brad Allen        5     113     225   +112   +22.4    22-24}}

Sign Tests:

Crew level:  13 of 18 crews negative, 5 positive   → one-sided p = 0.048
Game level:  45 of 70 games negative, 24 positive  → one-sided p = 0.0077
Year-over-year persistence (the more diagnostic question):

_{^{Crew              2022      2023      2024      2025
John Hussey       -5.0(1)   -27.0(1)  -37.0(1)  -42.0(1)   ← all 4 negative, getting worse
Brad Rogers       -4.5(2)   -38.0(1)  -40.0(1)  -7.5(2)    ← all 4 negative
Scott Novak       -43.0(1)  -37.0(2)  +2.0(1)   -62.0(1)   ← 3 of 4 negative
Ron Torbert       -54.0(1)  -66.0(1)  +1.0(1)   -4.0(1)    ← 3 of 4 negative
Carl Cheffers     +23.5(2)  -28.5(2)  -18.0(1)  +9.0(1)    ← mixed
Brad Allen        +8.0(2)   +31.5(2)  +33.0(1)    –        ← all 3 positive (retired ’24)
Adrian Hill       -6.5(2)   -40.0(1)  +53.0(1)  +26.7(3)   ← flipped from neg to strong pos
Craig Wrolstad    -25.0(1)  +29.0(1)    –       +38.0(1)   ← mostly positive}}

What this actually shows.

The crew-level sign test is borderline (p = 0.048). Game level is solidly significant (p = 0.008). Both consistent with the cumulative finding — the Bears are net-flagged-against across most of the league’s officiating, not just by a few crews.

But the per-crew sample sizes are still ugly. Most crews worked 2–6 Bears games over four years; the standard error on a single game’s net is ~50 yards, so even Hussey’s −27.8/g across four games has a 95% CI that crosses zero. You cannot, with this dataset alone, say “Hussey calls Bears games unfairly” with statistical confidence — you can only say his four data points all happen to be negative. That’s interesting but it’s not proof. Maybe he’s just a bad ref.

The two findings that meaningfully update the bias hypothesis, in opposite directions:

1. Spread-out negative pattern is real. 13 of 18 crews coming out negative isn’t what you’d see from a one-or-two-bad-crews story. It looks like the Bears get net-flagged against by most of the league. That’s the bias-consistent pattern or the structurally-flag-heavy-team pattern; both predict this.
   
2. Brad Allen’s three years are the killer counterargument to bias. All three of his Bears games came in clean +30s. Adrian Hill flipped from negative to strong positive over time. Wrolstad is positive. If the league were systematically tilted, you should see no crew running consistently +20 or +30 net for Chicago. The fact that you do — and that “+22.4/g” Allen exists in the same dataset as “−27.8/g” Hussey — is hard to reconcile with uniform institutional bias. It’s much more consistent with crews having different general flag-throwing tendencies, full stop, and the Bears being a flag-heavy team that gets hurt more by high-volume crews.

Let’s stop there, just for a moment. Last camp, how many times did you read that Ben Johnson brought the full camp to a stop. Huddled everyone up. He was seeing all manner of false starts, route confusion and guys not knowing what page they were on. He admitted he scaled back his offense. Is that consistent with a culture that sucks? A culture that had a lot of skating, a lot of dodging the hard mental work needed? Seemed that way to everyone at the time, because the consistent narrative was that BJ was changing the culture and making people accountable. 

You, dear reader, are saying “oh GP, you pretentious fuck, you all but admitted your bias, and while there is a counterpoint crew, you just gave your own game away. You showed that there is a large group of crews that don’t like the Bears. McCaskey is exonerated! Let’s salute the brave denziens of Twatter/X with their ability to call out mass fuckery!” 

Well.. hold on there Cowboy. 

The cleanest test still missing. 

What I haven’t done is compare each crew’s Bears-game numbers to that crew’s non-Bears numbers. If Hussey’s crew calls 50 against / 60 for in non-Bears games but 55 against / 27.5 for in Bears games, that’s anti-Bears. If Hussey’s crew calls 55 against / 28 for in every game they work, the Bears are just unlucky to draw the same crew four times. That’s the next layer of analysis, and it’s the one that would actually distinguish “Bears get unfairly flagged” from “Bears get a lot of flags and a few referee crews call a lot of flags.

That is for article three. Now… go get your shine box