Sparked by this forum topic, which marked 2 years since the last holding call OSU got in a B1G matchup, I charted every holding call in B1G games in 2024 and 2025. No bold conspiracy claims, just wanted to contextualize the stats visually. 

I had Grok do the research because only an insane person would comb through every single conference game's play-by-play individually and hand-gather the data. However, when checking its work, I found that the data was completely inaccurate. So I combed through every single conference game's play-by-play individually and hand-gathered the data. 

Some notes:

• Declined holding penalties were included. 
• Offsetting penalties were not included. For transparency's sake, Ohio State drew a holding call in 2024 against MSU that was offset. I did not include either as there was no choice to accept or decline.
• Holding penalties committed during punt and kickoff returns were also not included.
• Downfield holding penalties by the offense were included. Ohio State never got any of those either, so hey, why not lump them in? I also didn't note which ones were downfield and I'm not going back through all the data.
• I did not include the B1G CG or Rose Bowl to preserve an equal nine-games basis for the 2024 stats, which was my original scope.
• At this point of the 2025 season, most schools have played 6 conference games while a few have already played 7 (Indiana, Nebraska, Purdue, and Rutgers).

In all of 2024, the B1G called 75 total applicable holding penalties, with 69 accepted (nice). So far, there have been 54 holding penalties in the 2025 season and only 1 was declined. So 129 total holding penalties analyzed here.

I won't act like I can responsibly apply concepts like statistical significance, p-values, distributions, z-tables, or things like that because I've always been terrible at statistics and Stats 347 was over a decade ago. No, I'll be doing this irresponsibly. If anyone actually knows statistics and can point out errors, I'm all ears but you've gotta put it in very simple terms. 

As a pure guess, with 129 total penalties across 137 games, we probably can't get much confidence. But at least we're working with population data here albeit small.

Below is a chart plotting holding penalties called (y-axis) vs holding penalties drawn (x-axis). 

As you can see, almost every team is pretty close to the average. And then you have one lone dot aaalllll the way to the left. That's kind of weird, right? Yes, as you already know, Ohio State is the only B1G team to not have drawn any holding penalties in the entirety of the 2024 and 2025 seasons in B1G matchups.

Another way to visualize this is through a stacked bar graph, which might work better for some of you to see how 0 holding calls stacks up. This is for 2024 specifically.

The grand total of 0 drawn in 2024 & 2025 combined is 2.60 standard deviations below the average. If I were to ignorantly apply some statistics here, in a world where you would expect holding calls to be given equally in a normal distribution, meaning regardless of DL quality, there's a roughly 4.5% chance that a given team draws 0 holding penalties, let alone the #1 ranked defensive line in 2024 (Athlon) and the #1 scoring defense in both 2024 and 2025. One might even dare to expect more holding calls than average. Alas...

Below is an attempt to see if defensive rankings correlate with number of holding penalties drawn in 2024. It's not easy to find defensive line rankings so this is the best I've got.

If you recall, the closer the R² value of a trendline is to 1, the better. Meaning these are both bad predictors, but I just thought it was hilarious that the trendline when including Ohio State (the red dotted line) has an R² of 0.0001, which means it's complete and utter trash. But removing Ohio State's data point, the trendline (the blue dotted line) shoots the R² up to 0.1853 which, depending on the context, might be usable, but usually still not good. 

If you squint, you can see a wisp of a correlation, but you definitely wouldn't use it to bet your rent on how many holding calls a team is going to get. And it gets worse when you add in 2025 data. Don't use this as a heuristic. 

Lastly, one of the funnier charts is the number of days since the last holding call for each team:

 

I mean, I don't think I need to add any commentary here.

Yes, the B1G issues fewer penalties than other conferences (or so I hear). It's not like B1G refs are handing out holding penalties left and right. But it's not crazy to expect that we would get a couple penalties here and there, even somewhere remotely close to the average. Getting 0 in two years is crazy.

Anyways, just wanted to show you guys some of these charts and visualize how strange this statistic was. Whether you actually read all that or just looked at the pictures, thanks for taking a look. 

I will now be taking bets as to when we break this drought. Post your predictions below and we'll all give helmet stickers to the winner (if there is a winner).