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Josh Allen

  • Mahomes Isn’t The Only One Flag-Baiting

    Mahomes Isn’t The Only One Flag-Baiting

    There was a lot of noise this weekend—and rightly so—about Patrick Mahomes baiting defenders into late hits in hopes of drawing flags. He was able to get one early on in the game, but didn’t fool the refs later on when he loitered on the edge of the boundary and then flopped out of bounds once defenders arrived.

    For a lot of fans, I think the frustration came fast because it was reminiscent of another moment earlier in the season when Mahomes drew a foul on another (questionably) late hit.

    This was in the 3rd quarter:

    And then the no-call in the 4th quarter:

    This was a similar play that went viral earlier in the season where Mahomes danced near the sidelines and turned it into a big gain:

    To be fair to Mahomes, there were many more examples (just search “Patrick Mahomes late hit” on your favorite social media platform) throughout the season where flags were not thrown for hits near the sideline.

    Interestingly, if you search the same terms with “Josh Allen”—probably the second most popular quarterback in the NFL—it returns a lot less results. So it does seem like Mahomes is a bit of an anomaly due to his outsized celebrity (maybe from all the State Farm commercials).

    But I did want to try to find out if there was truly some bias towards Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in general when it comes to these late hit fouls. So I took a look at the play-by-play data from nflfastR and FTN Data via nflverse, which charts certain movement data like whether a QB went outside the pocket.

    Before we begin, there are two terms to define here. A QB scramble is defined by nflverse and is always a run play. It’s basically anytime a pass turns into a QB run. The QB being out of the pocket is anytime the QB exits the pocket.

    A QB scramble almost always means the QB is out of the pocket, but a QB being out of the pocket does not imply a QB scramble. In fact, a QB being out-of-the-pocket is a pass 68% of the time to a run 24% of the time, and is a QB scramble 25% of the time.

    The base dataset is all plays where a penalty was called on the defense that were not interceptions or fumbles lost.

    First off, I looked at unnecessary roughness and roughing the passer penalties specifically since these are the two penalties commonly called for late or illegal hits. According to the NFL rulebook, roughing the passer can be called inside or outside the pocket. If a QB is outside the pocket and on the move, they are allowed to be hit low or high (unlike when they are in the pocket), however if they stop moving and return to a “passing posture”, they can no longer be hit low or high again.

    The findings were interesting. Looking at plays where the QB was out of the pocket, Buffalo actually led the way with five unnecessary roughness or roughing the passer calls on the defense. KC only had one recorded.

    Unsurprisingly, some of the teams leading the way in this area have very dynamic, mobile quarterbacks: Josh Allen, Kyler Murray, Jayden Daniels, Justin Fields/Russell Wilson. However, the numbers are pretty low overall so far.

    Of course, the data is not perfect. There may be calls missed and charting data on in vs. out of the pocket is not always reliable either, plus it’s not guaranteed that the unnecessary roughness calls were called for hits on the quarterback. But we can still learn a lot from the general trends.

    Let’s cut the data a few more ways. First, let’s normalize for how many out-of-pocket plays a team has to see who’s getting the most calls proportional to the number of rollouts they do.

    All the below plots will be looking at the roughing the passer and unnecessary roughness calls only.

    Buffalo still leads the way on penalty calls when the QB is out of the pocket on a per-play basis, averaging about .3 penalty yards per out-of-pocket play, or about a call every 50 rollouts. As you can see, KC is near the bottom in this category.

    When we look at totals, the result is mostly the same. However, we’re only looking at one or two calls per team. Note that it is possible for the penalty to be less than 15 yards in both cases because they can be called within 15 yards of the goal line.

    Next, let’s look at QB scrambles where the QB becomes a runner. At this point, we shouldn’t see any roughing the passer calls but will still see the unnecessary roughness calls for late hits. There’s a lot less data here; there were only 10 unnecessary roughness calls out of 1181 QB scramble plays.

    Minnesota and Arizona both drew two of these penalties while the other teams had one. KC is notably not on this list (although please fact check me here because, as I said, the data may not be perfect. I was able to find two instances but they occurred on turnovers.)

    Last, let’s take off all the reigns and look at these two penalties across all plays, including those where the QB stays in the pocket.

    Here, Miami creep up as a big beneficiary of these calls (is Tua Tagovailoa’s injury history playing a factor here, perhaps?). Again, the Chiefs are very middle of the road here, showing no evidence of favoring Mahomes.

    On a total yardage view, there isn’t much change.

    Just for fun, let’s see who’s getting the most flags called against their opposing defense overall, without any filters on turnovers or penalty types.

    Here, we see that Minnesota, Washington, Dallas, and Buffalo drew the most penalties while Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and Detroit drew the least.

    While this is interesting, nothing really stands out and the distribution of penalties across the teams is fairly normal.

    So, to summarize, I think that fans have a short memory and also a memory that highlights the moments and players that are most infuriating and impactful to the result of the game. Patrick Mahomes is a world-class player and he’s on TV all the time. He’s also had some moments that have been A) on national television or B) gone viral where he has seemingly flopped or earned a call from the refs that was undeserved.

    That being said, I found no evidence in any of the data that the Chiefs get any more calls than other teams. In fact, they rank near the middle or bottom of most of the charts above.

    I agree that the NFL does need to figure out how to regulate the “QB as a runner” situation a bit better, because it is hugely disadvantageous to the defense when quarterbacks get these special protections near the boundaries that other players seem not to get. Whether it’s actually the case that these calls are made more often on quarterback runners than other runners is a whole other investigation (a quick glance gives me the impression that this is not actually the case).