Buffalo Rumblings
Believe it or not, but the pass rush for the Buffalo Bills has not been an issue on defense this season. They have the 11th-most sacks (average) with 26, 11th-most quarterback hits with 54 (also average), and the… you won’t believe this; fifth-best sack rate in the league.
They take down the quarterback over 10% of the time on passing downs. That makes the Miami Dolphins game a major anomaly.
There’s no punch line to this heading as it was no joke how little pass rush Buffalo generated. Factored into per-game rates, the Bills have just under three sacks a game and six quarterback hits. Against the Miami Dolphins, that was zero sacks and two QB hits.
Remember that 10% sack rate stat? The Bills would have been predicted to have two sacks in this game. That’s depressing not only because of the zero sacks, but also because doing that math means they only passed about 20 times (21 to be exact), beating the Bills handily without a massive day from their quarterback.
The NFL is a fluky sport because the small sample size of games lends a greater potential weight to anomaly games like this one. Now we all know that the Dolphins game counted, but if we remove it to see how they fared against other competition we get 26 sacks and 52 QB hits in eight games. That changes the sacks per game from 2.89 to 3.25, and the QB hits from 6.0 per game to 6.5. Hold on though, it gets worse.
Buffalo has played Miami twice already and in the first competition they had zero sacks and one QB hit. Yeah, that’s right it was even worse the first time around. More on that in a minute.
If we look at how Buffalo fared against non-Miami teams it’s still 26 sacks but in seven games, and 51 quarterback hits. That means against everyone else Buffalo averages 3.7 sacks per game and 7.3 QB hits.
No, I don’t believe so. Let’s examine why by looking at both games.
In the first contest Buffalo won 31-21. Right away we can say the flaw wasn’t “fatal” in that they won the game. That said, it’s also true that the game was tied midway through the fourth quarter. Buffalo finished strong to put up two more scores while the defense forced a turnover in-between to allow the team to pull ahead.
In the more recent contest, I would argue that the defense overall wasn’t a major issue despite allowing 30 points. I know that sounds like an odd statement to make, but after allowing 16 points quickly in the first half, the defense went lockdown mode for a very long stretch of play.
It wasn’t until it became painfully obvious that the offense was doing the opposite of “clicking” that they allowed two big run plays that went for scores. You might argue with me...
