Buffalo Rumblings
The Buffalo Bills traveled to New Jersey to take on the New York Jets and won pretty handily. The online chatter surrounding the game includes some assertions that the refs were a bit biased in the way they tossed flags. This chatter as far as I’ve seen are Jets fans who have plenty of reasons to be disappointed in the game.
While I could blow off their claims as nothing more than pot-stirring after a loss, it’s more fun to dig in and see if there’s any merit to it. We’ll have most of the usual penalty recap stuff, with a side of “were the Jets screwed over by the refs” at the end of it.
It’s a short week so I’ll cut to the chase on a lot of the basics. When it comes to total count or true count (right side set of columns) both teams had the same outcome of seven flags thrown. The Jets had two declined to Buffalo’s one, which is the big difference on the left side. All told, both teams were a bit under average though not so much so to make a big deal out of it.
I teased “lopsided” and here’s the start of information that suggests precisely that. Despite similar flag volume, there’s a major disparity when it comes to yards. Even just in regards to assessed yards the Bills had double that of the Jets. Adding in yards negated by penalty, the gulf between the two teams increased. That means the average severity of each flag (in yards) was drastically higher for Buffalo.
I won’t dive too deeply into the analysis here, but let’s run through a couple of these flags to review the formula and some key concepts to Penalty Harm, my proprietary rating scale for flags. The false start and defensive holding on cornerback Michael Carter II don’t need any explanation as they were both yards only. The same goes for one of cornerback Sauce Gardner’s holding flags (and the other was declined).
The offensive offside on wide receiver Arian Smith was declined so no need for the formula, but it’s a very rare penalty. Bills fans should be familiar though due to the Kadarius Toney flag that was a bit controversial. What’s even weirder is that Joshua Palmer was also called for one.
The defensive holding on safety Tony Adams was five yards and two downs for 0.5 + 2.0 or 2.5 Harm. The biggest deal of the day for the Jets though was the roughing the passer on defensive tackle Micheal Clemons. That negated two downs just like the Adams flag, but was assessed for 15 yards rather than five.
All told the Jets had 7.5 Harm, which is decently below our bad day threshold of 10.0 Harm in a single game. Or if we’re discussing the premise of the headline, there’s no measurement that...
