Buffalo Rumblings
The Buffalo Bills hosted the Kansas City Chiefs and hung on for a hard-fought win this past Sunday. Along the way they had to work through a couple of iffy calls from referee Carl Cheffers and his crew.
Now don’t get wrong as I tend to choose my words carefully. Cheffers didn’t straight up blow any calls, and there’s zero hint of bias in the flags thrown. I’m going to stand by “iffy” though.
I’m going to do something I rarely do up here in standard metrics: Real analysis. This is the usually reserved for some opening fluff, but not today. The fairness/bias of officials is a constant concern with these two teams, with fans of course divided over who’s getting “screwed” on the regular.
Neither team had all that many flags against them, but if you were looking for bias, it’s easy to say that Kansas City only had three flags. There’s a reason I look at thrown flags or “true” ones rather than just the assessed though. The Chiefs had two penalties declined, but remember that flags are only declined if something equally or more terrible occurred on the play.
For Kansas City, an illegal formation was declined due to it being third down and quarterback Patrick Mahomes being unable to connect with wide receiver Xavier Worthy. A defensive holding was declined on 2nd & 7 when quarterback Josh Allen found tight end Dalton Kincaid for 12 yards.
What I’m getting at is that if you look at it from one lens, Kansas City looks like they were insulated from officiating. Swapping the lens shifts the perspective to suggest the opposite. Both realities are true, suggesting in totality that by volume, neither team had a real advantage.
Here, too, things look a bit lopsided toward favoring the Chiefs. Breaking things down by rates, the Bills had 10 yards lost per flag. Kansas City had 8.33, so not a huge difference.
Negated yards skew things against Buffalo, but remember that there’s more to flags than yards or even impacted or “true” yards, and Kansas City had two declined penalties where the biggest mistake on the field was something other than the flag.
I already discussed the two declined flags and honestly most of these are pretty boring for the penalty nerds. Wanya Morris’ holding flag was yards only for 1.0 Harm from the 10 yards on the penalty.
Jaylen Watson was called for defensive pass interference. The flag itself was only called for five yards, but occurring on second down it gave up one free down. For the formula, that’s 0.5 Harm on the yards and 1.0 Harm for the down for 1.5 Harm total.
Last but not least, Mahomes threw the ball into the dirt mid-way into the third quarter. With Mahomes under duress and the ball landing nowhere near a receiver, the officials conferred and eventually tossed...
