The Buffalo Bills traveled to Atlanta to take on the Falcons in a game where they were generally favored. Instead, the team struggled to accomplish much of anything in a contest where they never seemed
to be in control.
Speaking of “out of control,” as you might surmise by the headline, the Buffalo defense had a particularly bad time with penalties. Just wait until you see what I have in store for you.
Standard and Advanced Metrics
Penalty Counts
As you’ll see as we move along with today’s penalty talk, days like the one Buffalo had are precisely why we have the Harm metric and weekly posts. The conversation we’d be having if only the standard metrics existed would lean toward the two teams having a somewhat balanced day, especially in counts.
Both teams also hovered around the league average. Atlanta had one penalty declined, making their assessed count and true count 6, 7 respectively.
Penalty Yards
Here’s where we start to deviate from the narrative the base stats tell us. In assessed yards, Atlanta had a pretty clean day considering their count of six flags total. It was quite a bit better than Buffalo too. Still though, looking at those stats would still point toward the Bills having a pretty average day overall.
On the right side of the chart, we see things starting to go awry for Buffalo. Adding in yards they wiped out via flag, the gap in yardage due to penalty widens significantly between the two teams. Just wait though. It gets so much worse.
Penalty Harm
Atlanta Falcons
For the most part, these are boring as it gets. Half of their flags were false starts that have no further story aside from setting them back five yards. Not great, but not a killer and certainly nothing more to discuss.
The offensive holding by safety DeMarcco Hellams came on a punt return. Due to when it occurred, it wiped out one yard of the return on top of the ten assessed yards.
Cornerback A.J. Terrell had two defensive holding flags. At the wrong time, a defensive holding flag can be a back breaker. Neither of these were with one being the declined penalty and the other just resulting in the five yards.
Cornerback Mike Hughes was also called for defensive holding and this is the only real Atlanta flag of note. This flag occurred on third down. Josh Allen’s pass was incomplete so this flag extended a Bills drive that may have ended there. I say “may have” as this was the drive that Buffalo went for it on fourth down. I don’t personally think that the Bills try 4th & 4 where they were on the field, but it’s theoretically possible. If you’re curious and forgot, Buffalo didn’t convert the fourth-down try so this penalty gave the Bills’ drive more life, but the offense couldn’t make the most of it.
To run through the formula for new readers, the five yards on that flag is counted as 0.5 Harm (0.1 for every yard), and 2.0 Harm for the downs given to Buffalo (1.0 per down as the flag took them from 3rd to 1st down).
For any new readers, when the total Harm of all flags goes higher than 10.0, we call it a bad day. The Atlanta Falcons, as you might have expected, had a good day with 5.6 Harm.
Buffalo Bills
For the sake of making you all as frustrated as I was calculating all of this, let’s start with the Bills’ 18.3 Harm total for the day. Yeah, approaching twice our bad day threshold. I don’t do brevity often but let’s do some brevity for, again, the sake of enraging any Bills fan reading this.
- Defensive end Greg Rousseau opened up things big on defense with an offside flag that wiped out a turnover. Turnovers being negated count as four downs (4.0) Harm, and whatever the flag was (0.5 Harm for the yards). If not for the flag this drive would have ended. Atlanta scored their first touchdown on this drive.
- On 3rd & 3 on their third drive of the game, quarterback Michael Penix Jr. threw an inc0mplete pass. Cornerback Tre’Davious White was called for defensive pass interference and the drive continued. Atlanta scored their second touchdown on this drive.
- On their fourth drive of the game, the very first play was a sack of six yards. This was wiped out by an offside flag on defensive tackle Ed Oliver. Now, assuming the next play was identical, that just means running back Bijan Robinson’s touchdown was for 92 yards instead of 81. That said, it’s possible the play call changes with it now 2nd & 16.
- Cornerback Christian Benford’s defensive pass interference occurred on 3rd & 14 and kept another drive alive. Buffalo was able to block the field goal try, but allowed Atlanta to chew up two more minutes of game clock.
- Defensive tackle Jordan Phillips’ encroachment gifted the Falcons a first down after the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter. Because of the first down, the Bills had to use all three of their timeouts to preserve the clock. There’s no guarantee that Buffalo gets a stop on the 3rd & 1 the Falcons were facing, but I’d have preferred seeing them get the chance. The gifted downs hurt bad.
The entire point of Harm’s creation was to gauge how the circumstances of the penalty impact its significance to the game. While the Bills had an off day, the Harm stat was knocking it out of the park. The number of flags between the two teams wasn’t that far off, but their relative impact on the game proved incredibly divergent. Ultimately, we’ll never know what an alternative universe with less flags results in, but it’s not unimaginable to think the Bills shut down the Falcons’ offense if it weren’t for a few key errors.
I word that deliberately as the intent is not me to say “They played terrific except…” Those errors matter just like any other errors. If anyone asks, “whose fault is it when a player misses a tackle” the answer should be “the player.” The Bills own these mistakes just like their other ones. Buffalo had a shot at locking down Atlanta’s offense and they blew it.
