Ulster yellow cards and their impact

I'm a fan of rugby.  Not the biggest fan in the world, but I enjoy watching a game here or there, whenever I've the time really.  Ulster games, however, I do try and make time for. Probably because of being from Northern Ireland and living a stones throw from Ravenhill (Kingspan stadium).

Many rugby fans will know It's a common occurrence during a game to see at least one yellow card get branded by the referee. And it's almost more common to hear the commentator state something along the lines of "a yellow card is worth 10 points to the opposition". Well is it?

I wanted to explore this commentator statistic to see if this has been the case for Ulster over the last few seasons.  The first Tableau graphic illustrates the average number of points each opponent loses during a yellow card, whilst playing Ulster.  These data have been accumulated for all Ulster games from the 2012/2013 season up to November 2015, but I decided to only go with Pro12 data for this graphic.  What I found of immediate interest is that Zebre, often considered the worst team in the Pro12, are only one of two teams that tend to come out the better side during a yellow card.  Granted this is a somewhat bias analysis only considering Ulster as the opposition. 

If I just take a simple average across all the teams it's clear Ulster don't benefit from the full 10 point average, but they still tend to see around a 7 point advantage. 

Ok so that was a quick and simple analysis and I have plenty of yellow card data to play with, so I'll have a look and consider who's the biggest culprit  for getting on the wrong side of the ref?

In this Tableau graphic I wanted to continue the theme of looking at the impact a yellow card can have on a team's performance.  This time I specifically looked at Ulster and how each of their yellow cards has affected a game.  I also wanted to highlight which players were more prone to getting on the wrong side of the ref.

As an Ulster fan it might be a bit of a surprise to see Iain Henderson and Rory Best near the top of the list. Or that four of the top ten are second rows, namely Iain Henderson, Dan Tuohy, Franco Van Der Merwe, and Lewis Stevenson. I also find it curious that Ulster really suffer with Dan Tuohy in the sin bin.

Although there isn't anything difficult in my analysis, it was an exercise I found enjoyable and something I haven't really seen done before. 

I still have plenty of yellow card data to look at, but I feel it would be more beneficial to have a full population - specifically all yellow card instances for all teams, and all major leagues.  I'm sure this will be something I'll return to soon enough.