Buffalo Rumblings
The Buffalo Bills traveled to Atlanta to take on the Falcons in a game where they were generally favored. Instead, the team struggled to accomplish much of anything in a contest where they never seemed to be in control.
Speaking of “out of control,” as you might surmise by the headline, the Buffalo defense had a particularly bad time with penalties. Just wait until you see what I have in store for you.
As you’ll see as we move along with today’s penalty talk, days like the one Buffalo had are precisely why we have the Harm metric and weekly posts. The conversation we’d be having if only the standard metrics existed would lean toward the two teams having a somewhat balanced day, especially in counts.
Both teams also hovered around the league average. Atlanta had one penalty declined, making their assessed count and true count 6, 7 respectively.
Here’s where we start to deviate from the narrative the base stats tell us. In assessed yards, Atlanta had a pretty clean day considering their count of six flags total. It was quite a bit better than Buffalo too. Still though, looking at those stats would still point toward the Bills having a pretty average day overall.
On the right side of the chart, we see things starting to go awry for Buffalo. Adding in yards they wiped out via flag, the gap in yardage due to penalty widens significantly between the two teams. Just wait though. It gets so much worse.
For the most part, these are boring as it gets. Half of their flags were false starts that have no further story aside from setting them back five yards. Not great, but not a killer and certainly nothing more to discuss.
The offensive holding by safety DeMarcco Hellams came on a punt return. Due to when it occurred, it wiped out one yard of the return on top of the ten assessed yards.
Cornerback A.J. Terrell had two defensive holding flags. At the wrong time, a defensive holding flag can be a back breaker. Neither of these were with one being the declined penalty and the other just resulting in the five yards.
Cornerback Mike Hughes was also called for defensive holding and this is the only real Atlanta flag of note. This flag occurred on third down. Josh Allen’s pass was incomplete so this flag extended a Bills drive that may have ended there. I say “may have” as this was the drive that Buffalo went for it on fourth down. I don’t personally think that the Bills try 4th & 4 where they were on the field, but it’s theoretically possible. If you’re curious and forgot, Buffalo didn’t convert the fourth-down try so this penalty gave the Bills’ drive more life, but the offense couldn’t make the most of it.
To run through the formula for new...
