Ever since the NFL introduced the concept of a "bye week" in the schedule, it has become familiar to hear a handicapper talking about how a team has an advantage for an upcoming game because they are coming back from a bye.

Whether there is any basis for believing that the bye can help a team over-perform the next time they take the field is what we will be examining here.

The reasoning behind why a team off a bye week might have the better of it include such notions as:

• Being Well Rested: the bye team has had nearly two weeks in most cases to heal from the inevitable injuries that occur during a season, as well as allowing players to in general recharge their “tanks” and get a little relaxation amidst the high pressure world of professional football
• Extra Preparation Time: you’ll come across this often in reference to particular high profile coaches - the idea being that the top NFL minds can be lethal with an extra week to scout out their opposition and devise game-plans. One would think that the extra week should allow for a better understanding of what works against a particular opponent.
• Additional mid-season practice time: while every team holds practices during the week, a team on a bye may have more intense ones. Players who are battling injuries may not practice much at all during the week, but with the bye can be expected to get in more snaps. There may also be a sense of having some freedom to experiment with new schemes since bye teams can do this and still have enough time to go over all the basics.
• Better mindset for players and coaches: to be on an NFL team is no doubt an emotional whirlwind. With only sixteen games a season, each one counts for so much that players can quickly lose perspective after a tough loss (or for that matter a great win). Getting the team fully motivated is such an important part of the coaching staff’s job and it seems likely that the extra week can promote a healthier sense of balance and get the players to just the right level of ”being pumped.”

Fortunately at TwoMinuteWarning.com we have the resources to provide a more statistically sound answer to whether a bye is a good thing or a bad thing.

Here are some results for a bye team against the spread in the week after the bye, when facing an opponent that did play the previous week (we’ll discuss a match-up with two teams off a bye in a moment):

Some explanation is necessary: the off win/loss refers to the team’s last game prior the bye, and the W-L columns are based on a team’s season to date won-lost record coming into the game.

Overall the snap answer is the bye week has little influence over spread results, as teams off a bye have covered a near-normal 48% of the time. However, once we start breaking it out there are some interesting observations to be made. First of all teams off a bye that are home favorites have been poor plays (28-44 or 39%). Home favorites off a loss are particularly suspect. Underdogs on the other hand are quite respectable off the loss at 34-24 (59%).

From this we can formulate two postulates for wagering purposes:
1) Play against a home favorite off a bye
2) Play on an underdog off a loss and a bye

Now our first recheck of these theories against fresh data begins by looking at those cases where both teams in a match-up are off byes. In these instances, playing against a home favorite would have resulted in a 19-14 (58%) record, while backing all underdogs off a loss was 21-14 (60%) proposition. So far so good.

Let’s turn next to the 2001 season - playing against home favorites off a bye yielded a 6-2 record, while underdogs off a loss and a bye were 4-4.

Interesting, very interesting.

A couple of additional points to note are that the timing of the bye may have some significance: home favorites playing in weeks two to nine are 22-29, but a horrendous 7-20 in week ten and beyond. Also a home favorite off a loss is 16-34 compared to the 28-35 record of a home favorite following up on a win.

There’s some merit then to using the “back from a bye” factor in your handicapping analysis…just probably not in the way you would have thought!