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.
Regular and Advanced Metrics
Penalty Counts
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.
Penalty yards
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.
Penalty Harm
Philadelphia Eagles
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.
Buffalo Bills
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 severe (though more numerous) than their competitors. In this game Buffalo had 8.4 Harm total or 1.7 Harm per flag. Less than the Eagles, but still quite a bit higher than their normal. Outside of the one offsetting penalty, the lowest Harm rating was 1.5 for the Bills, which is a heavy baseline.
For the ones worth talking about, let’s check out the video first.
For Dion Dawkins’ holding call it was 10 assessed yards, eight yards from James Cook wiped out, and one down negated. On the video front, I don’t love the hand placement and how long Dawkins stay outside the frame (though that’s not wording used by the rule book). That said, I’m not in love with the call. I don’t see a twist, jerk, or tackle. The ref likely saw the fall and made a guess, but guesses aren’t supposed to occur per the rules.
Matt Milano’s holding call was clear though. Once the receiver is parallel to you, you have to let go. He didn’t. That alone is enough for illegal contact. Then the arm was pulled back and the shoulders turned a bit. That’s plenty for a defensive holding. In this case that’s good for five yards assessed, it negated a four yard run, so that’s -4 yards impacted. It also gave up two free downs. I’m guessing the Eagles were fine “giving up” the four-yard gain in this case.
Joe Andreessen’s holding call on special teams to complete the trifecta of holding calls also seems to be the right call. Special teams calls can be hard to get a great angle, but there looks to be a material restriction caused by Buffalo Joe. This flag was 2.0 Harm because it was 10 assessed and negated 10 yards of the return.
Finally we have our fair-catch-interference flag from Sam Franklin Jr. which was the only one that was assessed yards only. I don’t know how viewers saw this one, but I know fans at the stadium thought it was a bogus call. It wasn’t. There is an exemption for contacting the player making a fair catch if you’re blocked into him, but there’s no argument for that here. The guy Franklin tripped over was in no position to block him into the returner since Franklin had decimated him moments earlier.
All of this is a distraction from the main point though. Ron Torbert hates the rain.
