Buffalo Rumblings
Ron Torbert had a very busy night
It’s not often that the data entry for an article becomes mentally draining, but here we are. It’s a fun fact that my spreadsheet is color coded by team and my mental health perhaps wasn’t helped by choosing to flag this game with the Seattle Seahawks “Action Green.” Anyway, the Buffalo Bills and Seahawks combined for a preposterous 32 flags (24 assessed). Roughly one out of every six snaps had a flag. There were four in row in the third quarter, all on Seattle. I could keep rattling off how insane it was, but you likely watched it and know already.
Just look at this nonsense. Do I even need to say anything? These charts are about as obvious as it gets. I guess I’ll say one thing. Depending on where you’re grabbing information from, the illegal shift on Buffalo (more on that in a minute) may or may not be counted. The spirit of true count is to examine every infraction that occurs for trending, so of course I counted it.
What makes this chart fun is that the left-hand side doesn’t look too terrible until you realize that the right side is so out of control it only looks kind of normal. At this point I’ll start introducing you to a narrative shift that I think the data supports. While it certainly could be said that Buffalo got a bit lucky with some freakish mistakes by Seattle, maybe the Seahawks were a bit lucky too.
This **** is so bad that penalty names are lopped off in the chart because of course I don’t have the formatting optimized for this many flags by one team. I would have rectified this but I felt the Seahawks needed to be taught a lesson. You sit there and think about what you did Seattle!
Surprisingly, the Seahawks only had 14.6 Harm in total, which is on the wrong side of the bad day line, but not as bad as I was expecting. Rather than try to highlight specific flags this week, I felt we could go a different direction that there’s not often enough data to justify. You’ll see what I mean in a moment, but first let me know if there’s a call you want more info on in the comments. I don’t recall anything all that controversial in the grand scheme of things, but I’m happy to revisit if someone wants.
This week there’s enough flags to warrant a change of pace. I track items that are more appropriate for season aggregates, but what the heck, let’s do it for a single game. I usually briefly talk about the impacted yards a little more thoroughly. Seattle’s 34 yards negated came on only three plays. The least impactful was 12 yards wiped out on the tripping call on a late Buffalo punt. The game was...
