Buffalo Rumblings
Neither the Buffalo Bills nor the Philadelphia Eagles have been known for avoiding flags this season. Yet both teams managed to avoid a pile of yellow laundry on a rain-soaked December evening game in Orchard Park, NY. Did Ron Torbert and company want out of the cold December rain? In this “journalist’s” opinion; yes.
In addition to low counts, there were no flags called in the final 20 minutes of game time. The relatively high harm per flag (spoiler alert) suggests they only called flags when there wasn’t much choice in the matter. If that was the main reason you clicked into this article, congratulations! You’re all done reading. If you want to learn more about the flags in this game though, see below.
I already indicated this above, but here are the full numbers. Both teams were well under the league normal number of flags. If we’re going to harp on the “Rob Torbert hates rain” hypothesis, a typical game would have about 13 flags that count (12.9) and about 15 flags called (15.44). This game had seven that counted and nine called. That’s noticeably less even for a casual viewer.
If indeed Torbert was trying to get an early night, it didn’t work. Other stoppages and factor led to a game time of three hours and seven minutes. Only three games have been longer this year, with a long of three hours and 15 minutes, for a total difference of eight actual minutes.
I hinted that the flags had a high relative harm and yards can often be an early indicator that flags were more severe than average, but there’s not a ton to suggest that here. The Bills did impact 14 yards in addition to their 40 assessed, but that’s not too crazy. The Eagles only impacted four in addition to their 36 assessed.
There isn’t much to dissect here, and the unnecessary roughness was offset by one on the Bills. Illegal formation flags are rarely worth discussing and this one is not. That leaves us two.
The defensive holding call on safety Marcus Epps negated a “sack” on Josh Allen of zero yards, but came on third down. That means the flag cost them five yards and two downs, or 0.5 and 2.0 Harm for the total of 2.5.
The defensive pass interference on cornerback Quinyon Mitchell also came on third down and gave up two free downs. It was assessed as 26 yards for a total of 4.6 Harm. The Eagles had 7.6 Harm total, which is well below the “bad day” threshold of 10.0 Harm but comes out to 1.9 Harm per flag. Buffalo’s opponents have averaged 1.45 Harm per flag this season, well below what the Eagles had.
Leaving where we just left off, the Bills have averaged 1.33 Harm per flag. Yeah, that’s right, their flags tend to be less...
