Did officials cost the Buffalo Bills a playoff win vs. Denver Broncos?

Okay I’m a bit guilty of a clickbait-y headline here. Obviously the flags were a big deal. When you have 47 yards of controversial flags, and six less controversial, on one drive in a “next score wins” situation, of course it’s a big deal. It’s a really flipping big deal.

Now that you’re here, let’s do some math on the penalties — which will tell us much more accurately just how big of a deal they were. As a heads up, I don’t feel the need for video this week as we all relived the flags enough as it is and I doubt I’m changing anyone’s mind at this point anyway. Assuming I’m inclined to do that in the first place.

Standard and Advanced Metrics

Penalty Counts

By objective metrics it could be stated that both teams had a pretty clean game where penalties weren’t a big deal. Two thoughts on that though:

1. Penalties go down in the playoffs, so while Buffalo is below season average, getting close to that number like they did isn’t a good thing.
2. There were plenty of no-calls throughout the game (evidence of above), so it’s pretty hard to dispel the notion of a bias when four of them came on the game-deciding drive in overtime.

Penalty Yards

Making things worse is this chart. When you’re below the mean in count, being significantly above the mean in yards also isn’t a good thing. The Broncos, on the other hand, are almost exactly what would be predicted based on the counts.

Penalty Harm

Denver Broncos

Well, it’s not like there are a lot of these, so let’s just talk about ‘em all starting with the delay of game. On 4th & 3, Denver was in field goal range and tried to get Buffalo to jump offside for a free set of downs. To be fair to head coach Sean Payton, defensive tackle Larry Ogunjobi had already flinched once earlier in the game. The Bills didn’t fall for it and the kick was still good, so no real harm here despite the 0.5 Harm.

Speaking of flinching to give free downs, Linebacker Jonathon Cooper did that for the Bills to help set up the game-tying field goal to send it to overtime. However, the word “help” is doing some heavy lifting here. It was 3rd & 1 and Denver really hadn’t stopped any “& Short” situations all game. You could argue it saved time and/or a timeout, but Matt Prater kicked the ball with 10 seconds left and Buffalo still had one timeout. It didn’t hurt the matter, but it was also mostly insignificant.

The offensive holding call on center Alex Forsyth did matter though. It negated a nine-yard play and set Denver back to 1st & 20 with less than a minute to go in the first half. The Bills had a great shot to stop the Broncos and… didn’t. They allowed a conversion for a new...