Buffalo Rumblings
Low numbers and low Harm
The Buffalo Bills are riding high after taking down the Baltimore Ravens in the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs. While there are certainly a lot of reasons to applaud the Bills, a big one that keeps coming up is the execution on both sides of the ball to play a tight, clean game.
That mistake-free brand of football carried over into the penalty realm with one of Buffalo’s cleanest games of the season.
Both teams came in under the league average in both count and true count. The Ravens were a little closer to the average output than the Bills were, though. There was only one flag declined, which happened to be on Buffalo. More on that in a minute as I attempt to create filler content to make up for the fact there’s not a ton to discuss this week.
Buffalo is making the math easy for us this week. You might be able to prognosticate from this graphic that Buffalo negated an eight-yard play, as that would explain the increase of eight yards in the True Yards column. There’s even a good chance you know exactly what it is too, with so few to choose from.
The Ravens ended up with 7.3 Harm, most of which was on one flag. Regardless, it falls below our bad day cutoff of 10.0 Harm. The delay of game, neutral zone infraction, and illegal use of hands were all assessed yards only — and not worth a big conversation.
For the two that are left, we may as well make GIFs. Here’s the holding call on linebacker Chris Board late in the game. This came on a kickoff right after a Tyler Bass field goal to put Buffalo up by eight. While Baltimore did come close to tying it up, the extra 10 yards from Board didn’t help. Making it worse, it negated 10 yards of the kickoff return.
It seems pretty obvious why this one was called, so on to the next one courtesy of old friend Tre’Davious White.
With this flag, I’ve seen some chatter thinking maybe this should be OPI rather than DPI. The theory being that White was looking for the ball and Keon Coleman runs through White.
Both players are clearly playing the ball, but White still can’t restrict Coleman, and bare minimum Coleman seems to have his right arm restricted. Being fair, I don’t think I would have been upset had this not been called, but I see why the ref threw the flag.
This 18-yard flag gave up two downs as the play was on third down.
It amuses me when charts basically don’t need to exist, yet here they are anyway. Here you go! Buffalo had 1.8 Harm, which is basically a day where your own penalties didn’t matter in the slightest.
This flag on Rasul Douglas...
