Happen to yell “C’mon ref!” during the Super Bowl last night? More than likely, fans on both sides felt frustration during a call or two. Miami alumni Mike Macey ’17 and Mickey Whitford ’17 and professor Rhett Brymer are no different – except that they have access to big data analytics tools, and the skills to use them, to back up their frustrations. It turns out there’s more than one way to determine bias in referees. The traditional way, used by the NCAA officiating teams, is for monitors to view game film and judge how good or bad certain calls are. They also watch for any systemic biases, such as referees throwing games or tournaments. The second way, which Brymer ascribed to, was to use data analysis to make the same determinations. Brymer collected data from every major college football game played from 2012 to 2015. He entered more than 38,000 observations into one Excel sheet. Macey and Whitford’s main task was to take the data and turn them into something readable. The analy...