FanPost

Buffalo Bills penalties: year in review

Timothy T. Ludwig-USA TODAY Sports

Here's the second of my anticipated three part series to wrap up 2016 penalties committed by the Buffalo Bills! Look for the third installment soon; titled "Penalties: Why the Bills Ought to Hire Me."

A few notes on this and that before we begin...

  • Here's the link for any newcomers on my signature "Penalty Harm" stats
  • Penalty counts include offset and declined penalties. So no whining that they don't match the totals of other sites. I do this because I think the tendency to commit penalties is important. Just because something worse happened to your team on the same play doesn't excuse you from your own **** up
  • However, offset and declined penalties are assessed 0.0 harm. Harm is more like how it affected the team, whereas counts reflect individual actions
  • Some positions are FAR more likely to get penalties than others, so for each player I'll try to bring in some facts about that position league wide to put it in better context. Ex: CBs are penalty prone by nature, and a CB having a higher count than a LB is meaningless. We need to compare CBs to CBs
  • For my countdown here, I'm more worried about player tendency than damage done. So my "top ten" is by count as they represent players that provide the most numerous opportunity for a facepalm. I'll clean up any wackiness/discrepancies on harm at the end though

The Raw Data

  • As noted last time, the Bills had 127 penalties called, for 1229 yards and 171.9 units of harm (this will be important later as I assign players "portions" of these)
  • 38 different players were penalized for the Bills. This could be higher, but some penalties aren't called on specific players (even though it might be a player's fault) which skews things a touch
  • 13 players were only penalized once
  • James Ihedigbo was penalized once. Did you remember that we had James Ihedigbo on the team?

Fun Facts

  • Despite rushing for negative yardage over the course of the season, Reggie Bush scored 8 points!
  • Brian Moorman had two consecutive seasons with a PERFECT passer rating of 158.3. People who say "___ was our best QB since Kelly" are wrong unless they remember it was Brian Moorman

Top Ten

10. Lorenzo Alexander

One of the best surprises of the year, the Lorax, starts us off. With 4 penalties for 4.0 harm he was occasionally a factor in the penalty department. The Lorax has a tendency to try to get a head start, with 2 Neutral Zones, an Offsides and one Holding call. For LBs, he comes in tied for 19th place. And honestly, there's a ton of guys with 4. Would I prefer he had lower? Sure. James Harrison had only 2 for instance, and he's pretty good. But he's not especially penalty prone.

9. Nickell Robey-Coleman

NRC also comes in with 4. His harm is a little worse at 6.5 though. Chalk that up to more serious penalties. Two DPI calls, a Facemask and Unnecessary Roughness. One DPI had 4.4 Harm. CBs are usually pretty penalty prone, so let's see where 4 puts him. Hmmm...see what I mean? Same number as Lorax, but he's tied for 49th place in the CB world. And there's a lot of guys tied at 4 again

8. John Miller

Miller hit 5 penalties for 4.1 harm. They were literally all Offensive Holding. For guards, this puts him in a tie for 19th place. Similar to Lorax. Would you like to see less? Sure. But I doubt he's getting a reputation off of this.

7. Ronald Darby

Darby also ended with 5. His harm was 9.5 though. He had a couple bad DPI calls. Roughness, illegal block, and holding also all happened. He spread the wealth. We already established CBs are penalty prone. Where NRC was 49th place, Darby lands at 28th. So still in good company honestly. He's not a particular problem

6. Tyrod Taylor

Yep. Here he is. 6 penalties. Only 3.0 harm though. These were ALL Delay of Game penalties. Let's just say we'll all be curious to see if sideline dysfunction was an issue here. QBs pull from one of (if not THE) smallest pool of starters in the game. Let's check his rank then. He's in a 3 way tie for 8th with Newton and Rivers. Doing a quick scan of QBs, delay is the biggest issue. This is something to clean up, but it can be harder to pinpoint if it's the player's fault entirely.

5. Cordy Glenn

At this point, you might start seeing a trend. You've been warned. 7 penalties, 5.8 harm. Holding is back again but only twice. Glenn is much harder to pin down than a lot of players. He also had calls for tripping, illegal use of hands, false start and illegal formation (2). For Tackles, this puts him in a tie with a ton of players for 30th (including a teammate). In this position group there are NINETEEN players with 10 or more penalties. This group gets called a lot

4. Jordan Mills

And here's that tied teammate! Seven penalties and tied for 30th in the position group. His harm is way higher though 12.2. In fact, he's the third highest harm by player. A couple of really bad Holding calls elevated this number a great deal. He had four of those, and 3 false starts.

3. Richie Incognito

For the top three, I won't discuss Harm just yet. But Richie was good for 7 penalties as well. Now, Miller was at 19th with this group and there are a lot of names in his neighborhood. It's common for guards to have some penalties. It's less common to see repeat offenders. This puts him in tie for 6th place with a couple other players. So Incognito does have a bit of a problem. Holding was the most common offense.

2. Jerry Hughes

Now I said in another post that Hughes isn't as bad as he used to be. I stand by that, but it needs an explanation. His first 3 years in the league saw totals of 2, 5 and 5. However, in Indy and in his first year here, he was on the field in a limited fashion. So the 5s are actually decently high. In Marrone's last year he had 9. In Rex's first year he had 14. He had a Roughing the passer, two Roughness calls and a facemask this year. Yikes. However, if you look at the film these appeared to be incidental most of the time. I believe his reputation is a bit of a factor. And the year before he had 7 Personal Foul type penalties. Many of these didn't look incidental. Especially pre-wrist bands. He had been on nearly a 1 per game pace before the wrist bands. He is however, likely to always be a high penalty guy. By Jerry Hughes' standards, he's doing better. By Defensive Ends though, he's tied for first (aka "worst"). He still has work to do obviously.

1. Stephon Gilmore

Remember when I said there was a crap ton of tackles that had double digit penalties? There's a lot of corners that do too. And even a QB or two. There's a good deal of players with double digits, which is my usual bar between "that could be corrected" and "dude really needs to cut the ****." Not even Gilmore gets us there though. The Bills finished as pretty average for penalties, and I think it's off the back of a bunch of "kinda high" players, rather than a few really bad ones. Gilmore is tied with Hughes in count at 9, but gets the nod for a higher harm rating (though he's NOT the highest harm on the team). For CBs he BARELY cracks the top ten (tied for tenth actually). He has a penalty problem for sure, but he's not quite to panic mode if you can believe it. 5 holding calls and a smattering of others got him in this spot.


Penalty Harm

Here's the top 10 based on harm...

Name Count Harm
L.Alexander 4 4
J. Miller 5 4.1
E. Wood 3 4.2
S. Lawson 2 4.8
A.Washington 3 5
C. Glenn 7 5.8
M. Goodwin 3 6
NRC 4 6.5
R. Darby 5 9.5
N/A 13 9.9
J. Hughes 9 10.5
C. White 3 11.1
J. Mills 7 12.2
S. Gilmore 9 15.1
R. Incognito 7 22.6

There's an obvious correlation to count and harm. But when you factor in a few things, it demonstrates that Corners and Offensive Lineman are likely in a position to hurt your team the most. Hughes stands out. Incognito's nullified TD against the Bengals is the only reason he edges out Gilmore.

The "N/A" rating is interesting to me, and I think it's something that McD might be able to make strides with. 5 of those were 12 Men on the Field. That's right at the top of all teams. Nine teams had none all year. Add in 2 illegal formation penalties, 2 illegals shifts and one illegal substitution...it paints a picture of pre-snap confusion. Which we all suspected already.

Just another great fan opinion shared on the pages of BuffaloRumblings.com.