Bills beat Jaguars and lopsided officiating in Wild Card win

Due to the performance of head official Brad Allen and his playoff crew, I don’t believe the usual clips I do of key flags makes sense so there’ll be none of that below. Do I, noted ref apologist, believe that Brad Allen and company did such a great job that a review is unnecessary? Not at all.

In fact I, noted ref apologist, don’t think video is necessary this time around because I agree with the masses on this one. That was a catch, the Jaguars did not get set before the half, and there were at least a couple Bills flags where my reaction was immediately “nope, I don’t like that at all.”

For new readers and to put this in context; I will go to my grave arguing with anyone who believes otherwise that Cody Ford was guilty of that blindside block against the Houston Texans. Fingers crossed we get a better showing than this — with Carl Cheffers and a playoff crew — to face the Denver Broncos. That may be asking for far too much, however.

Standard and Advanced Metrics

Penalty Counts

Yeah, even knowing that Harm ratings can throw the idea of who had the worse day out of whack, it looks like it’s going to be a very tough hill to climb this week isn’t it? Don’t worry Bills fans, this only gets worse as far as which team had the short straw in flags.

Penalty Yards

Up above, the Bills had three times as many flags accepted compared to the Jaguars, which is not great. For yards though, it’s just shy of four times what Jacksonville had. So that means not only did Buffalo have more flags, but the average severity was worse.

I can keep going. It wasn’t many, but the Bills had yards negated via penalty (one four-yard rush by James Cook III), whereas the Jaguars had none.

Penalty Harm

Jacksonville Jaguars

I mean just look at this foolishness! Offensive tackle Walker Little was called for two false start flags, and… that’s it. That’s all that counted. The defensive pass interference call on cornerback Jarrian Jones was declined with wide receiver Brandin Cooks catching the pass.

Having this low of a total Harm rating (1.0) isn’t unprecedented. Early in my penalty-discussing career, the Bills had a 0.0 game with a single flag thrown on them that was declined. These games are very rare though.

Add this into the same mix as at least two pretty bad non-penalty calls, and this is a bad game for Brad Allen.

Buffalo Bills

I’ll run through the formula for a couple of these flags, but the thing to know is that Buffalo had 6.3 Harm on the day, which is well below our bad day threshold of 10.0 Harm. That said, the 10.0 line is built for the regular season rule of thumb, and the playoff threshold would be a little lower. Not quite as low as 6.3 mind you. The fact remains though that it was a very lopsided game in terms of penalties called.

Buffalo had three times as many flags that counted. They had four times as much yardage. They had over six times the total Harm rating. Now for the formula…

Tight end Dawson Knox’s false start was not half the distance to the goal. Sometimes the play-by-play accounts round the yardage to the nearest yard. That applies to both pre- and post-penalty. The refs likely moved the ball five yards, but the rounding methodology for the play-by-play rounded out a yard for the official records.

Wide receiver Tyrell Shavers’ offensive holding was the usual 10 assessed yards, but was the play that called back James Cook’s run.

Cornerback Christian Benford’s holding flag was one I recalled not liking live. It came on third down, so it gave up two downs in addition to five yards. To be more precise it was 3rd & 8 and the Jaguars were on their own 39-yard line. In other words, the defense earned a stop and this flag took it away. Jacksonville would eventually score a touchdown here.