It's interesting....I charted this out a bit this morning for my own purposes regarding penalties.I can’t wrap my head around the fact that we have an offense with a ton of pre-snap motion….and the play-calling head coach can’t get a play in with enough time to allow the motion to happen.
In the first 4 games, with mostly our regular starters on the field, we averaged 5 penalties a game.
In the 2nd 4 games, with Tua out and the back up QB's in there, along with injuries starting to hit on defense, we average 8.25 per game
In the 3rd 4 games, with Tua back and him on the field, we went back to averaging 5 per game.
In the final 5 games, it really blew up. Defensive penalties in particular were way up but the offense wasn't far behind
It seemed by looking at it game by game, that when our original starters were on the field, we had the lowest amount of penalties by far. As injuries happened and more and more backups played, you could clearly see the impact on the penalty numbers.
Not sure how I am interpreting yet, as I'm going to break down offense vs. defense to take a deeper look, but I do suspect that injuries hurt us in many more ways than we realize