Nine false starts give Bills a predictable finish

The Buffalo Bills went into Sunday's game with the second-most penalized offense in the NFL. Make that No. 2 with a bullet. The Bills might climb to the top of the charts after their sloppy effort in a 6-3 loss to the previously winless Cleveland Browns. The Bills committed 13 penalties and their offense was responsible for 11 of them, including an incredible nine false starts. It's one thing to jump on the road when crowd noise is a factor. But it's an entirely different matter when it happens at home in front of cooperative fans who allow players to hear the play calls. "Way too many penalties," Bills coach Dick Jauron said. "[You] certainly put yourself in a hole when you do that." The Bills' patchwork offensive line was the primary culprit on Sunday. Tackles Demetrius Bell, Jonathan Scott and Kirk Chambers had two false starts each. The other two were by rookie left guard Andy Levitre and center Geoff Hangartner, who also got a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty. The only lineman who didn't get cited was rookie right guard Eric Wood, but that's only because the Browns declined a penalty on him for an ineligible man downfield. The false starts were obviously contagious because even veteran wide receiver Lee Evans got caught moving before the snap. "That was some of the worst I've been around," Evans said. "That's on everybody, the entire offense. It's hard to move forward when you keep moving yourself back like that. If we play like that every week, we don't have a chance at really beating anybody." Bell, who returned to the lineup after missing last week's game with a groin injury, attributed the penalties to a lack of concentration and focus. "That's a lot," he said of the nine false starts. "We just never got the ball rolling. We killed ourselves. It is definitely embarrassing. We just have to take accountability upon ourselves and tighten down on the concentration." It started raining yellow flags on the Bills' second play from scrimmage when Bell was hit for his first false start. The drive never got going after that and the Bills were forced to punt. "I started off with the first one and it just went downhill from there," Bell lamented. Levitre was penalized on a third-and-1, effectively ending the Bills' third possession. On and on it went, as each false start penalty turned short-yardage situations into longer down and distances. Quarterback Trent Edwards blamed some of the mistakes on the Bills trying to run the no-huddle at a faster tempo. "It's frustrating because we have guys that know the snap counts, we know the cadence and we were trying to use that as a weapon," Edwards said. "Their D-line, we saw on tape, tended to jump offsides a little bit, so we were using some hard counts, we were using some quick counts as well. I think that's what got us is some of our quick counts. "For some reason or another, we weren't set. We were going on the wrong sound. I don't know how many [false starts] it was, but it was a lot." Jauron pointed to the youth of the offensive line as a reason for the false starts. But Hangartner said neither inexperience nor the no-huddle had anything to do with the errors up front. "We have been practicing that snap count since [organized team activities]," he said. "We have to do a better job of staying onsides. It's inexcusable and we've got to do something to change it. We just can't have it." e-mail: awilson@buffnews.com