The Buffalo Bills got the win over the Los Angeles Chargers, but the final score only tells part of the story. The turnovers grabbed plenty of attention, yet the penalty mess was right there with it, and Buffalo’s flag-filled afternoon pushed the game into rare territory.
The Bills were supposed to handle the Chargers comfortably. Instead, they made a habit of wiping out big plays and putting themselves behind the sticks. The numbers backed up the eye test, too: Buffalo posted a near-record showing in the writer’s proprietary penalty rating stat, while Los Angeles landed in the middle of the pack by comparison.
By raw penalty counts, the Chargers were simply average. That was nothing glamorous, but it looked mild next to Buffalo’s day.
The bigger wrinkle came in the penalty yards that actually mattered. Buffalo didn’t just absorb the assessed yards; it also erased 47 additional yards beyond that, nearly matching the Chargers’ total assessed yardage with negated yardage alone.
Los Angeles had its own issues, though they never rose to Buffalo’s level. Per the Harm metric, the Chargers finished with 7.6 Harm total, comfortably below the 10.0 line that marks a bad day. The biggest spike came from Cole Strange’s two false starts, a reminder that the count of a penalty can matter just as much as the yards attached to it.
Joe Alt’s offensive holding, which wiped out a nine-yard Justin Herbert scramble, was the most notable individual play on the Chargers’ side. The article notes that all yards count as 0.1 Harm, so that one flag added up to 1.9 Harm when the assessed yards and the negated yards were combined.
Still, the most damaging sequence for Los Angeles came in the third quarter. Two false starts hit with only one play in between them.
The first came on 2nd & goal at the one-yard line. That turned the down into 2nd & 6, and after an incomplete pass, another false start backed the Chargers into 3rd & 11.
Instead of getting two or even three cracks at the goal line, they ended up settling for a field goal.
Buffalo’s own penalties did far more damage. Dawson Knox’s offensive holding alone outpaced the Chargers’ entire Harm total.
His flag erased a Ray Davis touchdown, and in this system a touchdown is worth 7.0 points/Harm. The holding was a 10-yard penalty and also wiped out 14 yards from Davis’ 43-yard run.
It was the kind of explosive play that can swing a game, and Buffalo saw it vanish.
Christian Benford’s defensive holding was another costly mistake. It gave Los Angeles a free down, added five yards, and erased an interception. In the Harm framework, turnovers count as four downs of opportunity lost for the defense, which makes that kind of flag especially painful.
All told, the Bills finished with 26.5 Harm, far beyond the 10.0 bad-day threshold. The article says it wasn’t the worst game since the stat was created - that distinction still belongs to Buffalo’s 2020 game against the Denver Broncos, when three touchdowns were negated - but this was still close to that level, and it showed.
A separate article is set to break down the roughing the passer calls from the weekend, including the Rousseau flag. As a preview, the writer said that one is not a call they like. Even so, the overall verdict here was clear: the flags were mostly justified, and Buffalo’s repeated mistakes nearly handed the game away.
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