It looks biased towards the favourite team even when I watch non-Tigers games. The first few penalties for inside the 10 in defence and holding down in the ruck seems to stongly favour the favourites.Unfortunately a significant amount of the bias comes from you / from us as fans. We all see and remember the bad calls against Tigers and start to forget those against other clubs, because we are not emotionally involved.
I am pretty sure there is a provable subconscious bias for home teams, i.e. home teams tend to win the penalty count and win more than 50% of matches. But I think you'd be very hard pressed to prove a bias in either (a) bias towards good vs bad sides, or (b) bias specifically against Wests Tigers.
Even if you analyse penalty counts or scores, it would be as true to say that better teams score more points and force their opponents to concede more penalties, which takes the ref argument out of the equation.
@Champ1 's other point about reviewing some tries and not others is also something that I have noticed. Turbo holding back one of our players was ignored, Deardon taking out Brooks looked questionable to me.
Observation bias is real and I know I have it, but I do see a bias towards strong teams even when I have tipped them and want them to win.
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