Buffalo Rumblings
Does our final penalty cap of the season reveal any impropriety at Arrowhead Stadium; and what about analytics?
It’s never easy saying goodbye, and we’re about to say farewell to penalty recaps for this season. We’ll have season data for Buffalo Bills penalties to sort through, but it’s not the same.
I won’t be doing GIFs this week, instead saving the time to pen an opinion piece on officiating as a second standalone. Don’t worry, there’s still intriguing content assuming you can bare to sort through the wreckage of our collective emotions from yet another traumatizing season’s end.
Siiiiiiiiigh...
When it comes to assessed flags, the two teams ended seemingly pretty even. When we add in declined penalties, we see a bit of a gap appear. Overall though, I don’t think the count is the story anyone cares about this week.
Ha ha ha ha! What? Based on projections from counts, the Bills are right where you’d expect them to be. The Chiefs, on the other hand, had an astonishingly low amount of yards based on the count.
Remember that even the smallest penalties count for five yards, which means the baseline for five flags would be 25 yards. Sure there are “half-the-distance-to-the-goal” situations, but you get the idea. It’s very rare to fall below five yards per flag. But wait!
There’s more! When we factor in True Yards, Kansas City’s yards go down. We’ve seen that before, but it’s like falling under five yards per flag. Very rare. That means the Chiefs have already hit two very rare penalty milestones.
I won’t dive much into fairness here, as I believe fans have already seen what they need to from this game and have their minds made up. Even I’m of the opinion that this wasn’t the best-officiated game, to say the least.
The Bills hit 10.1 Harm total, which is 0.1 above our bad-day cutoff. We’ll talk the formula a bit this week — and feel free to vent/discuss in the comments.
Let’s start off HOT! Like most of you, I was raised with the mantra of “two wrongs don’t make a right.” With the NFL though, we’ve been taught “two wrongs don’t make a right, but they frequently offset to make a neutral.”
Defensive tackle Jordan Phillips was flagged for unnecessary roughness, which made a Kansas City XP a bit easier. How tight end Travis Kelce wasn’t called for taunting is perplexing.
I want to be clear, there was no functional difference in outcome if he had been called. The extra point is still going to be good in all likelihood, but when you come into a game where nationally a focal point is biased officiating, this sure doesn’t help.
I don’t believe many of these require much conversation and I’d like to stick to some main points. Those are things like defensive tackle Ed Oliver getting his first penalty...
