I did a run through the team penalty numbers and it appears that there is a pretty significant issue with penalties. Here is the data. It is listed by season with the highest team penalty total followed by the lowest team penalty total.

NFL
2009 - 131, 69
2010 - 148, 65
2011 - 163, 76
2012 - 145, 60
2013 - 152, 69

MFN-1
2013 - 66, 28
2014 - 57, 23
2015 - 47, 18
2016 - 59, 19 *projected for 16 games

MFN-2
2013 - 55, 25
2014 - 58, 19
2015 - 61, 23

I also looked at all the season in the test league and the results were very similar. There were only a few seasons where the top team averaged over 4 penalties per game. That is 64 penalties per season.

If you look at the numbers you will see that the highest MFN teams have less than the least penalized NFL teams on average. This may explain why the rushing totals are too high for the MFN leagues. There is probably tons of holding not being flagged :) You might want to look at how intelligence and discipline factor in to how a penalty is determined.

Awesome data, thanks. I really appreciate you doing these analyses, it's data I have been wanting to cull but haven't taken the time to.

I'm going to roll this in with the end-of-season update, I'll be playing with the balance over the next couple of days.

I really enjoy sifting through the numbers and appreciate you letting me look at your test league. I'll continue to make my way through all the stats.

By the way, the team penalty stats are off. In the league page it gives a value of about 3 per team for the worst offenders. Yet, looking at "opposition", no one seems to have had more than 1 penalty per game against, which seems impossible.

I noticed this last night as well.