Buffalo Rumblings
A few weeks ago I made a comment that the Buffalo Bills were one of the lower-penalized teams in the league, and that this was atypical for them. Well, they’ve righted the ship. Of course by “righted” I mean they’ve had several bad games in a row and are now in line with typical Sean McDermott-era performances. To be clear, that’s typically a bit above average.
Right now they’re averaging 7.33 assessed penalties per game, tied for 13th-worst in the league. Nothing crazy, but they’re not known for being a clean team either. Let’s dive into some of the trends since we’re coming off Buffalo’s bye week and I don’t have a game to analyze.
See? They started off so strong and then… less so. These roller coaster results aren’t unusual for the Bills, and I don’t see any reason to believe that over time this won’t wind up in the same old spot it always does. It’s a bit above average but nothing crazy. That said, there will be the occasional crazy result in a particular week — whether that’s a three or a 15.
For the blue line of “yards” or “assessed yards” it’s typically a good mirror for the counts, though an occasional anomaly can occur. Not so much with Buffalo this year, though. Similarly, the distance between the two lines can vary a great deal as the volume of impacted yards can drastically vary. The Bills have added about 20 yards of extra damage via impacted yards per game with the Miami Dolphins’ contest in Week 3 being the biggest anomaly.
This is the only chart I have comparing to opponents as the ones above would be too cluttered with that addition, and this stat covers a lot of the questions that might be answered anyway. Harm is not a perfect measurement, but I wouldn’t still be sticking with it after all this time if it hadn’t proven itself useful time and time again. There’ll be some information about what feeds into the formula via the next couple graphics, but the gist for new readers is that Harm “flags the flags.”
By weighting the outcome of a flag through a combination of assessed yards, negated or otherwise impacted yards, free downs, and negated scores; Harm grades each flag by its potential to impact the outcome of a game. An offside call can simply give a free five yards, or it can give an entirely new set of downs while simultaneously wiping out a huge loss of yards by way of a sack or tackle for loss.
This chart does mostly correlate with the counts above, but the most recent game against the Atlanta Falcons stands out as a massive anomaly. When considering the factors that penalties affected, Harm rates this game as the worst of the season.
As a result of the inclusion of opponent data here, we can also draw a conclusion that suggests Buffalo isn’t being treated unfairly...
