From a poster on IT
The refs are not to blame (or shouldn't be, at least), for our loss to OU nor any suboptimal performances like against UH. However, seeing the Houston Cougars, who were a 80-90th ranked team in terms of penalties coming into last week, only get hit with one accepted penalty for 15 yards (the result of a helmet being ripped off)... I decided to at least take a look.
Here are some facts to do with what you will:
There have been 6 games refereed by Big 12 crews this year (all different crews)
In every single game, Texas' opponent has recorded fewer penalties and penalty yardage than their average in other games
Texas' opponents are averaging 85% more penalty yards per game and 58% more penalties per game against non-Texas opponents
Taken in aggregate, the average Texas opponent giving up only 23.5 penalty yards per game would rank 2nd in the country, only 0.5 yards behind Army (23.0 yards/gm)
3rd would be Michigan at 24.9 (a full 1.4 yards more); 8th in the country would be Temple, at 35.4 (a full 11.9 yards more)
Said differently, when playing Texas, opponents (all of them) are averaging 12 yards fewer penalty yards/gm than the 8th best team in the country at mitigating penalties
No single opponent has had more than 30 yards of accepted penalties. That means the most-penalized single opponent outing would still be 6th in the country if it was their season-long average.
Said differently, every single game has resulted in fewer penalty yards than the 6th best penalty team in the country averages
In aggregate, the average Texas opponent giving up 3.3 penalties per game would rank 4th in the country (Army at #1 is averaging 2.9)
Texas' opponents are better on average than the FBS average for penalties, but the fact that all of them are combining for it (and beating their non-Texas average) is statistically improbable
Caveats:
This does not account for declined penalties, of which there are surely some. I'm just not going to do that work.
Of course some penalties, such as false starts or delay of games, are non-judgement calls.
However, their average yardage per penalty is almost 20% higher in non-Texas games -- this could imply that there are more judgement-related long penalty fouls, such as holding and DPI, being called against them in non-Texas games
You could also claim that Texas doesn't put its players in a position to draw penalties as well as other the other teams our opponents played. But, given the weakness of our opponents' non-Texas schedules, plus the strength of our D-line and receivers... that seems... unlikely.