Seriously — not great.
What a game, huh? You don’t see teams that drop 42 points on the back of a literal superhero performance lose all that often. Yet here we are, the Buffalo Bills having dropped in a shootout with the Los Angeles Rams. I won’t be doing GIFs this week for a few reasons.
- The volume of flags cuts into my available time
- I have to help my youngest make brownies for a school thing
- Interested to check out the Simpsons MNF deal
But most importantly this game is rare in the fact that I think the officiating was bad. Bad calls. Bad no-calls. GIFs are usually used to either help explain a rule or discuss if a penalty was legit. Well, that’d be quite the rabbit hole this week. I don’t know if this was as bad as the Shawn Hochuli game from last year, but the fact that I had to pause and think about it means it’s close enough.
Standard and Advanced Metrics
Penalty Counts
A trend you’ll see this week is that no matter how bad it looked for the Bills, the Rams had the worse end of penalties that were called. Buffalo wasn’t actually that far off of league average, which seems wild looking back. It felt like half the game had a flag.
There’s another thing worth discussing in the trends this week: The league numbers all went up slightly. This season has been trending higher than last year, and this far into things I’m feeling like we’re about locked in to a significant increase. That’s especially notable with penalty numbers being pretty consistent the last few years and those consistent years were lower than the previous ones. Since I’ve been tracking these, flags had overall declined until this year.
Penalty Yards
The gap between the two teams widens when it comes to yards. For how high the volume of flags was, the amount of impacted yards seems pretty low. I don’t really have much more to add here (see disclaimers above).
Penalty Harm
Los Angeles Rams
The Rams totaled 17.1 Harm, which is significantly above our bad-day cut-off of 10.0 Harm. A major chunk of this was safety Quentin Lake’s defensive pass interference call. The 34-yard flag came on fourth down and gave up three free downs. For the formula that’s 3.4 Harm for the yards, and 3.0 for the downs.
With this many flags, I won’t go through the formula for all of them, but feel free to ask away in the comments. There are some wonky ones that are begging for a conversation though.
Linebacker Byron Young was hit with an offside flag that landed at 0.2 Harm. This one was weird for a couple reasons. Happening at the LA one-yard line, the assessed yards are officially recorded as “0.” Running back James Cook was tackled for a loss of two though, meaning the flag negated that TFL.
Offensive lineman Kevin Dotson was called for an illegal block above the waist. I mention this one as running back Kyren Williams gained 14 yards on the play and the penalty was assessed at the spot of the foul, only negating 13 of the 14 yards.
Perhaps the craziest one was the too-many-men-on-the-field call. On 3rd & 3, James Cook gained four yards for the first down. The offside gave up five, but negated that four-yard gain. The penalty was not credited with the down when it comes to its Harm rating, as Cook had the first on his run. In other words, the practical impact as well as the Harm rating is a one-yard advantage over letting the play stand.
Buffalo Bills
Buffalo’s total harm was 10.6, just over our bad-day line. The worst one was the face mask call on right tackle Spencer Brown, which also negated a 13-yard run on 1st & 15. Not far behind was defensive back Ja’Marcus Ingram’s defensive pass interference flag. The flag itself was only five yards, but also gave up two free downs.
Similar to the too-many-men flag by the Rams, cornerback Rasul Douglas was called for illegal use of hands. At half the distance to the goal, it was assessed at four yards. The Rams had gained six yards on the play, meaning the spot of the ball was actually two yards wors for Los Angeles. However, the play occurred on second down and the free first was too good to pass up. For the formula, that’s 0.4 – 0.6 + 1.0 for 0.8 Harm.
This might be the game with the most pass-interference flags I’ve ever seen. Making it even more zany is that you don’t usually see the penalty count bars in the chart come into play as players rarely commit the same penalty twice in the same game. Rasul Douglas and left tackle Dion Dawkins decided to make good use of it though.
Weekly Trackers