It’s a lot more fun to write about the Buffalo Bills when they play well and holy moly is it going to be fun this week! The Bills took on one of the best run defenses in football and made that statement
look like it should include the word “allegedly.” There’ll be plenty of film to dissect to enjoy this win, so pardon me for a somewhat simplified penalty recap this week.
Standard and Advanced Metrics
Penalty Counts
Let’s just be candid. The Bills won by four scores. There are no stats in the universe that could make it look like they had a bad day and I’m not about to start painting that picture. Objectively they had a much worse day than Carolina did when it comes to penalties. It was an average day for the NFL however, the Panthers just had a really good day at avoiding flags.
Penalty Yards
Once in a while these are drastically out of whack from what you’d expect, but this is not one of those cases. This is all perfectly in line with what you’d expect based on the counts above. If there’s any quirk to be had it’s that the Panthers averaged five yards per flag, which would be rare to have only five-yarders for a full 60 minutes. To be clear on how rare that actually is, it didn’t happen in this game. See below for more details.
Penalty Harm
Carolina Panthers
There are only four to go through and the encroachment is boring. So here are the other three. I noted that the Panthers did not have four flags of five yards, so let’s discuss the illegal touch on a pass by wide receiver Xavier Legette. The flag itself does not directly impact yards and goes down in the record books as a 0-yard flag. Additionally, though this one was caught, the receiver is not eligible to make a catch and therefore there’s no impacted yards either. It does however result in a loss of a down, which is 1.0 Harm.
Legette’s other penalty was also not a five-yarder, giving up 10 yards on the offensive holding. It also wiped out an eight-yard run on the play as well as one down as the run had gotten the first. All in all that’s 2.8 Harm. For any new readers each yard is 0.1 Harm. This flag had 18 total (assessed 10 + 8 negated). Negated downs are also given a 1.0 Harm rating
Cornerback Jaycee Horn was called for defensive holding, which was the second-highest Harm of the day for Carolina but potentially the biggest impact. Occurring on third down, this flag also gave up two downs.
Our bad-day threshold is 10.0 Harm total. With 6.8 for their day, the Carolina Panthers had a pretty good day for flags.
Buffalo Bills
The Buffalo Bills barely wound up on the wrong side of things with 10.7 Harm total. One of the shortcuts I’m taking this week is writing penalties ASAP and not worrying about clips so I can focus film-room attention on a couple players I’ve been waiting to see in action. It was a good week to not worry about replays as I don’t think any call was particularly controversial, but if you’re interested in a specific one let me know.
For instance, the defensive holding on safety Jordan Poyer gave up a down in addition to the five yards, and was pretty obviously the right call on the broadcast replay. Defensive end Michael Hoecht made an impact in his debut, including on an unnecessary roughness call in the fourth quarter giving a few little shoves to a defender on the ground. Like Poyer’s holding, it was pretty clearly the right call to throw a flag.
The two most impactful flags were both shown quite well on the broadcast and were also both the right call by the refs. Joey Bosa got greedy and tripped quarterback Andy Dalton for a 10-yard flag. It also wiped out the 12-yard sack Bosa could have gotten.
On the worst penalty of the day, wide receiver Curtis Samuel didn’t line up quite at the line of scrimmage, which led to an illegal formation flag. The five yards also wiped out a first down from third, for two lost downs as well as the one yard the Bills had gained for the first down.
Eight penalties, as noted above is pretty average. Compared to the last couple weeks, “pretty average” is looking pretty good. On paper the Bills didn’t have a good day with flags, but didn’t look too hindered while watching things play out.
