Buffalo Rumblings
The Buffalo Bills win over the Miami Dolphins felt way closer than the 10-point final margin would indicate. Along the way the real story happened. Penalties. In the Sean McDermott era the Bills haven’t been shy about racking up penalties, which makes any day where they get away mostly clean an anomaly. Let’s dive in!
The Dolphins come in just under the mean for both sides of the chart. However, to illustrate how clean the day was for Buffalo, it’s pretty wild how much lower their bars are. Also, check out the league average for count. That might be a good omen. Or just a coincidence. I’ll let you be the judge.
The yardage charts tell a similar story, though if there’s a numerical connection to Western New York it’s lost on me. Buffalo’s unusually clean day continues through this metric.
When it comes to the blue and red version of this graphic, boring is better and this is very boring. The offensive holding on left tackle Dion Dawkins and unnecessary roughness on defensive end A.J. Epenesa were both yardage only. The offensive holding on tight end Dalton Kincaid was the 10 yards assessed plus a 10-yard gain by wide receiver Elijah Moore.
Buffalo’s total Harm for the day was 4.5, which falls below our “bad day” threshold of 10.0 Harm by a significant margin. Put plainly, the Bills were not remotely hindered by flags.
I’m going to apologize this week as I’m in a bit of a time crunch so no clips and I won’t have time to run through all these. Miami had 14.3 Harm, which is decently above our bad day level. Not too many of these were straight yards only. The defensive pass interference on cornerback Jack Jones was it.
I think we all recall the roughing-the-kicker call so no need to recap that one. Just kidding, in addition to the 15 yards on the flag itself, going from fourth to first down gives up three downs.
Ineligible receiving running down the field was something the Dolphins seem to like. This happened twice, with both penalties negating first down and a handful of yards.
Linebacker Jordyn Brooks’ roughing the passer call was interesting in that the Bills were close enough to Miami’s end line to make it half the distance to the goal, or two yards. Quarterback Josh Allen was sacked on the play and the flag also negated three of these yards.
If I missed anything you wanted recapped, let me know in the comments.
