Hold On, Week 17 Edition

January 1, 2019

By Noone From Tampa

This is part 17 of my ongoing series on penalties in the NFL.

The Redskins battle against the Cowboys was a forgettable game with a lot of forgettable players playing in the Redskins secondary. The best news from the game was that the Redskins secured the number two overall pick and the Eagles knocked the Cowboys out of the playoffs.

The penalty highlight for this week was the ineligible forward pass because Wes Martin was too far upfield when the ball was thrown. That was the first time it was called against the Redskins this season, but it was called 52 times in the 2019 season.

The Redskins had four penalties called this week with two accepted while the Cowboys had eleven penalties with ten accepted.  The two accepted penalties were the fewest of any game this season. The problem was more on the execution end, especially on the defensive side of the ball. The Redskins end the season not ranked in the top 5 in any penalty category.

The league-wide rankings through week 17 are as follows:

Rank	Total Penalties Called	Total Penalties Accepted	Net Difference	Net Yards Difference
1	Jacksonville Tampa Bay	Tampa Bay	Oakland	Oakland
2		Jacksonville	Jacksonville	New Orleans
3	Cleveland	Oakland	New Orleans	Jacksonville
4	Oakland	Cleveland	Tampa Bay Buffalo	Cleveland
5	New Orleans	Arizona		New York Jets

New Orleans and Buffalo are the only playoff teams in the top 5 rankings this week.

Through seventeen weeks, the Redskins had 131 total calls with 106 accepted while their opponents had 110 total penalties calls with 94 accepted, resulting in a net difference of -12. The Redskins net yards difference is -30 yards which is 15^th in the league.

The league chart below shows the number of penalties by team, both before and against and the net difference through week 17:

The green part of the bar graph is the number of penalties against that team, the blue part shows number of penalties called against the opponent, the yellow line represents the net difference between the two, and the dark green line is the number of wins.

Across the NFL, a penalty was called every 10.9 plays and each game had an average of 16.2 flags thrown in it.

The next graph is the overall league penalty call distribution across the league through 17 weeks for penalties that have 1% or greater of the total calls:

The most common penalty is still offensive holding which was called 1.63 times more than the next most frequent one, false start.

The top 10 penalties in the NFL and the percentage of overall penalties called are:

Penalty	% of Calls
Offensive Holding	21.7%
False Start	13.3%
Defensive Holding	8.2%
Defensive Pass Interference	7.4%
Defensive Offside	5.4%
Illegal Block Above the Waist	4.2%
Unnecessary Roughness	4.2%
Neutral Zone Infraction	3.9%
Illegal Use of Hands	3.5%
Roughing the Passer	3.4%

Next, let’s look at what types of penalties were called on the Redskins and their opponents:

The net difference on holding calls is now at +1 calls now with the Redskins having 37 and their opponents having 38. Thank you, Dallas Cowboys. The Redskins had no holding penalties and the only false start was on Steven Sims.

This next chart shows which players are getting the penalty calls:

The graph has been filtered for players committing more than one penalty. The Redskins penalty leaders this week are Morgan Moses, Donald Penn, Brandon Scherff, Jimmy Moreland, and Jeremy Sprinkle.  There was one false start penalty again this week, committed by Donald Penn.

Looking at calls by unit, the offense gets over 50% of the penalty calls:

Lastly, with some important free agent decisions to be made about the offensive line, the next chart shows how the penalty calls breakdown across the Redskins offensive line which struggled at times this season:

If anyone has specific questions about penalties and how the Redskins compared to the rest of the league, you can tweet me @noonefromtampa or hit me up in the comments section.

 

 

Data Sources: nflpenalties.com, nfl.com