Skarey Movies Presents: The Buffalo Bills’ Third-Quarter Woes

It’s penalties, but trust me the data is pretty nuts

Are you sick of reading penalty articles about the Buffalo Bills yet? Well two thoughts. One, apparently I wasn’t sick of writing them. Two, you’re in luck you can just watch the video for this one. To be fair, I had only planned on writing two articles, which can be found here, and here. On that second one, I wrote a paragraph leading up to a chart looking at trend data by quarter.

That paragraph was sincere. I had not looked at the trend-by-quarter numbers for penalties until literally that moment. I was expecting a pretty “meh” result and mostly even distribution. I was wrong. The raw numbers by quarter were crazy. So crazy that I couldn’t drop it. I decided to take a deeper dive and if you have a bit over eight minutes to spare, I assure you that it’s worth your time.

If you didn’t think it was worth your time to watch the video, go back up and watch it. The raw numbers show a pretty massive spike in the third quarter for penalties. I took a look at league data, which shows a mostly even distribution should be normal.

With my notion that the Q3 situation in Buffalo really was a problem, I turned my focus to penalty types by quarter — and since this is promoting a YouTube video I don’t mind using the phrase “and the results will shock you.” Not only did Buffalo have a real problem in the third quarter, but I was even able to isolate a couple specific penalty types that caused headaches.