Buffalo Rumblings
If you’re like me, and heaven help you if you are, you found the penalties called by Alex Kemp and his crew to be quite annoying. As aggravating as the yellow laundry was, it barely proved an annoyance. with neither team impacted all that much by flags. Buffalo in particular was not held back in any meaningful way by the officiating.
It doesn’t sound like I’m giving you much reason to read this article this week, so to get you to keep going I’m going to do something a bit unusual for me and grab a video to breakdown a non-call.
Looking at our first “usual” measure, the Buffalo Bills and Pittsburgh Steelers are both right around average, though the Steelers fared a little better. In a very atypical turn of events there were zero offset or decline penalties. If Alex Kemp announced it, it was assessed. Well, except for that facemask that New York corrected before it was assessed, but somehow after it was called on the field. Weeeeeee!
This is why deep-dive stats are important. The yardage for both teams is within striking distance of average like the counts, but in the opposite direction with Buffalo looking better than Pittsburgh. This strongly suggests that Pittsburgh actually had a worse day with flags, but we’ll discuss it more below. The Bills didn’t impact any yardage on top of what was assessed, and Pittsburgh had a scant seven added in.
Look at all these boring flags. Offensive tackle Alec Anderson started things off strong with two false starts, one on each of the Bills’ first two drives. Neither were good things, but it’s also hard to say it killed either drive. The interception was the bigger deal on the first drive. On drive two, the loss of two on first down was likely worse than a false start, as it killed a down along with the loss.
Also on the second drive was the delay-of-game flag. Quarterback Josh Allen tried to get the defense to jump around midfield to try to get Buffalo five yards closer on 4th & 10 where maybe they’d have gone for it, or tried a long field goal. Instead they got five yards more space to punt, which didn’t matter because it was a touchback anyway.
The kickoff-out-of-bounds flag was explained well on the broadcast and was a good penalty as it allowed the 15 yards from the Cam Heyward taunting flag to be assessed, essentially netting Buffalo a free 10 yards on the kickoff.
Safety Sam Franklin Jr. was called for holding on a punt return. There’s not much else to the story really on this one.
Last but not least is the curious case of defensive end A.J. Epenesa’s unsportsmanlike conduct call. Epenesa smacked the ball out of wide receiver DK Metcalf’s hands after a catch. You might recall defensive end Javon Solomon doing...
