–Yeah, when you look at the last 11 years (2000-2010), there is a bias: 18669 penalties enforced on visiting teams, 17557 enforced on the home team

–That’s a total of 152,421 penalty yards on the visiting team, versus 144,502 penalty yards on the home team (51.3% vs 48.7%).

–The bias doesn’t go away when you eliminate false start and delay of game penalties

–But this seems like such a small bias–I still think there’s a reasonable explanation in that it’s just harder to execute well on the road in front of a hostile crowd.

It should also be observed that there is a wide range of rates at which teams get penalized. The Raiders incurred the most penalty yards in this period (11,352). Not counting the Texans (who didn’t play in 2000 or 2001), the Jets had the fewest yards (7,328).

The Packers were more-or-less in the middle, a bit toward the high end with 9,559 yards.

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Some more penalty stats:
–By far the two most-called penalties were Offensive Holding (951) and False start (852)

–Defensive Offside (349) and DPI (287) were a distant third and fourth

–The most penalized teams were Raiders (208), Lions (196), Titans (183), and Eagles (179)

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Again, I’ll try to figure out a way to link to it as I’d like to read it again myself (I admittedly just skimmed through it). Just a very interesting article.

With you Phil on that one – I forgot about the Gonzalez “catch”.

For visiting teams, I count 2318 called penalties, 1984 enforced
For home teams, I count 2347 called penalties, 2026 enforced

Offsetting and declined penalties were both counted as unenforced.