Look, why don’t you do us both a favor. Just refresh on the page a few times to get me some extra clicks and then be on your way. There’s no reason to actually read the content this week as the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings put on an absolute CLINIC on how to be boring as heck with penalties. Wait! You’re insisting on plowing through? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Standard and Advanced Metrics
Penalty Counts
So this isn’t too terribly boring in and of itself, but it’s also not very interesting either. As we always do, we start off with
the overall volumes for both teams (aka “counts”). This is the usual information for flags that can be found pretty much everywhere. So yes, the Bills had twice as many flags as the Vikings but I bet you already knew that.
Penalty Yards
If you’re a penalty nerd like I am, this chart is the first blaring alarm for how boring this game might be. If you take the yardage total and divide it by count, the Vikings average five yards per penalty which is a strong suggestion of boring procedural flags. There’s a couple ways that could be wrong, but we’ll see soon enough. The Bills are just a tick shy of eight yards per flag, maybe something will be intriguing there.
Penalty Harm
Minnesota Vikings
Yeah, that’s boring as heck. Three false starts and one defensive offside. All pre-snap flags for five yards each. None had a larger impact outside of that such as a lost down, impacted yardage, etc. So yes, super boring this week. Their 2.0 total Harm for the game is well under our 10.0 bad day threshold.
Buffalo Bills
Buffalo got close to the bad day numeri with 9.4 Harm total. That said, there really weren’t any controversies. Josh Allen’s intentional grounding call was clearly the right call. It cost the Bills 13 yards and the one down from the foul being on top of the yardage.
Spencer Brown had two false starts called, which was only 40% of the Bills total. Damar Hamlin’s defensive holding call came on first down and negated a two yard loss which would also be correctly tallied as a “sack” if it weren’t for this.
Terrel Bernard was called for pass interference which had 19 yards assessed to go with two free downs given to Minnesota for a total of 3.9 Harm (1.9 for yards and 2.0 for how many downs the flag gave up).
And that’s it. The more boring for the Buffalo Bills the better honestly. Don’t stir the pot with penalties and it helps your odds of winning the game. It just makes this article worse I suppose.
