NFL fans have long argued that referees favor the Kansas City Chiefs. New research may back them up.
A study by researchers from The University of Texas at El Paso and the University of South Carolina found that officiating during the Patrick Mahomes era has disproportionately favored the Chiefs, especially in the postseason, aligning with the team’s rise as one of the NFL’s most marketable and financially valuable franchises.
The research, published in Financial Review, suggests that financial pressures tied to television ratings and league revenue may subtly shape officiating behavior, raising questions about fairness and integrity in one of America’s most scrutinized institutions.
The study, led by Dr. Spencer Barnes, an assistant professor of finance in UTEP’s Woody L. Hunt College of Business, examined more than 13,000 defensive penalties from 2015 to 2023.
The findings point to a striking asymmetry: postseason officiating appears to systematically favor the Mahomes-era Chiefs, even when controlling for game context, opponent, and situational factors.
“Our findings suggest that when the league’s financial health is at stake, rule enforcement may subtly shift to protect market appeal,” Dr. Barnes said in the press release. “The fact that postseason penalties consistently favored one franchise, while similar dynasties showed no such pattern, points to the powerful role of financial incentives in shaping supposedly neutral decisions.”
The analysis found that during playoff games, penalties against defenses facing the Chiefs’ offense were 2.36 yards longer, 23% more likely to result in a first down, and 28% more likely to be subjective calls—penalties that hinge on referee discretion.
In practical terms, that means postseason flags helped sustain drives and swing momentum in critical moments, often when the stakes and television viewership were highest.
Interestingly, those effects were absent during the regular season and did not appear for other top-tier franchises.
“When conditioning on down to go, referees are more likely to call penalties that favor the Chiefs on third or fourth down, which are situations where penalties can directly extend drives,” the researchers write. “Importantly, we find no comparable postseason effect for the Brady-era Patriots, the Alex Smith–Andy Reid-era Chiefs, or other recent contenders such as the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, or San Francisco 49ers.”
In finance, “regulatory capture” describes a process in which oversight bodies, intentionally or unintentionally, become biased toward the powerful entities they are meant to regulate. Dr. Barnes and his coauthors, Dr. Brandon Mendez of the University of South Carolina and independent researcher Ted Dischman, argue that the NFL provides an unusually transparent test case for this phenomenon.
Unlike financial markets, where enforcement is opaque and slow, NFL officiating happens live, in full public view, under enormous commercial pressure.
In 2024, the league generated roughly $23 billion—placing it on par with major S&P 500 companies such as 3M and Halliburton. With billions at stake in television contracts and sponsorships, researchers say the league’s financial ecosystem creates powerful incentives to keep star players and high-profile teams, front and center.
The study points to the 2015–2017 period as a turning point. Those were years when the NFL faced political backlash and a sharp ratings decline tied to national anthem protests and social controversies. Then came Patrick Mahomes, a charismatic, marketable quarterback whose dynamic play style helped revitalize viewer engagement.
According to the researchers’ analysis of Nielsen data, Chiefs games after 2017 drew nearly four million more viewers on average than other NFL matchups and boosted television ratings by nearly 20%. As the Chiefs became a television juggernaut, the study found that postseason officiating patterns began to tilt in their favor.
To isolate the effect, researchers employed a fixed-effect panel regression—essentially stripping away all the noise that could explain away the pattern. The model accounted for factors like down, yards to go, home-field advantage, and even specific officiating crews.
The key finding was that postseason penalties against defenses playing Kansas City consistently went farther and occurred at more decisive moments than similar calls against any other team.
Even more telling, the effect seemed to grow stronger when the same referees who had previously officiated a Chiefs playoff game were reassigned to call another Kansas City postseason matchup. Those referees, the study found, were significantly more likely to issue calls in the Chiefs’ favor in high-leverage situations.
“We find that the postseason effect for the Mahomes-era Chiefs is driven entirely by referees with prior playoff exposure to that team,” researchers write. “This pattern is consistent with a mechanism in which playoff-caliber officials, those trusted with high-leverage games, adjust their decision-making in ways that may reflect league priorities.”
This alignment between officiating behavior and the league’s financial interests, the authors argue, may be a subtle form of institutional bias—one that doesn’t require overt corruption or directives from the top.
Instead, it may reflect what happens when referees internalize the league’s commercial imperatives, consciously or unconsciously, under pressure to maintain ratings and narrative drama.
“The NFL evaluates officials based on performance, with postseason assignments and especially the Super Bowl going to the highest-graded individuals,” researchers write. “At the same time, incentive alignment between the league and its officials may be more complex than a simple performance-based model suggests. The NFL’s grading criteria are opaque, non-public, and subject to league discretion.”
The NFL has long understood that its value lies in spectacle. As the researchers note, earlier work has shown that controversial calls and dramatic finishes keep audiences glued to their screens, boosting engagement and, by extension, advertising revenue.
In this context, a close game involving a megastar like Mahomes is more profitable than a one-sided blowout. Subtle officiating biases, the study suggests, may serve to “regulate” the entertainment product, keeping it exciting while protecting the league’s financial interests.
Researchers stress that their results are correlative, not causal. This means they cannot prove intent or coordinated manipulation. However, the consistent postseason bias toward one franchise, they argue, raises valid questions about how financial dependencies shape decision-making under pressure.
“To add more economic context, Kansas City’s 13 postseason appearances since 2018 have featured 78 total penalties, which translates to 16.2 net first downs and 198.5 net penalty yards favoring the Chiefs under our estimates,” researchers write. “These effects are material in a league where the average margin of victory in postseason games is about 9.23 from 2018 to 2023.”
That erosion of impartiality, researchers argue, mirrors what happens in finance, politics, and even the judicial system—settings where powerful actors can shape enforcement outcomes not through corruption, but through dependency. In both markets and sports, the need for stability and profit can subtly influence who gets the benefit of the doubt.
The researchers connect their findings to decades of economic literature on decision-making under financial stress, noting parallels between referees and regulators who face implicit incentives to protect the institutions that sustain their industries.
Just as a central bank may favor large firms to maintain market stability, a sports league might benefit from ensuring its most profitable stars remain in contention.
The idea that money might shape officiating isn’t new—sports fans have long accused referees of bias. However, this new research transforms that intuition into data, showing measurable patterns that align with economic incentives.
Researchers stop short of alleging conspiracy, instead emphasizing that their study reveals structural bias—a system that rewards outcomes beneficial to the league’s bottom line, often without anyone needing to act unethically.
While the Chiefs’ success story remains a product of elite athletic talent, coaching, and strategy, the research invites a deeper question: how much of modern sports is truly meritocratic when entertainment value and financial survival are intertwined?
“Our results align with broader behavioral economics research on decision making under uncertainty, suggesting that rule enforcement may be systematically influenced by team stature and league-driven financial interests rather than solely game dynamics,” researchers conclude. “These findings carry implications for the economics of sports entertainment, as postseason officiating discrepancies may impact competitive balance, public trust in officiating integrity, and the NFL’s long-term financial strategy.”
According to Dr. John Hadjimarcou, dean of UTEP’s Woody L. Hunt College of Business, the implications go well beyond football.
“This research not only deepens our understanding of sports governance, but also illustrates a larger societal concern: when financial pressure weighs heavily, impartiality can erode,” Dr. Hadjimarcou explained. “Spencer’s work demonstrates the power of academic inquiry to reveal hidden dynamics that affect fairness, competition, and trust in institutions.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email:LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com