Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video is back as Week 2 of the 2023 NFL season begins. Last week’s game was a relatively clean one, with only seven penalties, but what will we see from our Week 2 Thursday Night Football referees? Let’s look at what we might expect from the on-screen action.
Who Is the Referee for Week 2 Thursday Night Football?
Tonight’s referee for Thursday Night Football is Clay Martin. Last week, he was in charge of the Indianapolis Colts’ game against the Houston Texans, where there was a total of nine flags thrown and eight accepted penalties.
Martin’s crew actually threw the fewest flags in Week 1 with nine. They had the third-fewest accepted penalties on the week, behind only John Hussey’s and Carl Cheffers’ crews. In the game between the Colts and Texans, Martin’s crew had an even number of accepted penalties on the home and road teams.
Week 2 #NFL referee assignments #NFLTwitter pic.twitter.com/UIRKOul1Nd
— nflrefstats (@nflrefstats1) September 13, 2023
While you might hope that will lead to a clean game that is evenly called, it is worth noting that Martin’s crew threw the sixth-most flags per game last year (13.76). They also had an extreme discrepancy between home and road, with greater than two more penalties per game on the road team (6.88) than the home team (4.76).
The caveat to that is that we do see each crew change from year to year. At the start of the season, each referee is assigned an officiating crew from the NFL’s officiating roster. Martin has three new members of his crew, including a rookie NFL official as his umpire James Carter. Here is the full list of officials on Martin’s crew:
- Umpire: James Carter
- Down Judge: Jerod Phillips
- Line Judge: Greg Bradley
- Field Judge: Alonzo Ramsey
- Side Judge: Dave Hawkshaw
- Back Judge: Greg Wilson
- Replay Official: Brian Matoren
- Replay Assistant: Bryant Thompson
How Many Flags Did the Eagles and Vikings Have?
We don’t have a huge amount of data to go on in 2023 when it comes to teams’ discipline. With only one week in the books, we will likely see these things evolve. In Week 1, the Vikings had six penalties against them for a total of 45 yards. Two of those were false starts, with one offensive holding, one defensive offside, one neutral zone infraction, and one face mask.
The Eagles also had six flags thrown against them, one of which was declined. That left five penalties for 49 yards. Those five penalties were spread across five different categories. There was one penalty each for offensive holding, chop block, roughing the passer, neutral zone infraction, and intelligible downfield kick. The declined penalty was for an illegal formation.
That discipline in Week 1 could have some level of consistency as these were two of the more disciplined teams in 2022. The average number of accepted penalties per game in 2022 was 5.55 for 45.57 yards. The Eagles averaged 5.25 penalties for 38.7 yards per game, with the Vikings at 5.06 penalties for 38.94 yards per game.
