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 something we investigated in an article that appeared in this space a few years back. Now however is a good time to not only update the findings, but also take the research one step further!

The thinking 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."

Those all seem like plausible enough points, but the contrary view is that as so much attention is focused on teams coming off a bye and that most people view it as a positive, there is then likely to be some value against the point spread in going against the bye team.

Back to the original article – looking at games from 1991 to 2000 (a ten year span), we discovered the following principles that seemed to lead to solid spread results when one team was coming off a bye (but not both):

1. Play against a home favorite off a bye
2. Play on an underdog off a loss and a bye

Since the article was written we’ve had three additional complete seasons, and had you elected to play the above two ‘angles’ your record would have been 20-17 (54%) going against the home favorites off a bye, and 13-10 (57%) with underdogs off a loss and a bye. That’s not earth shattering performance of course, but both tenets held true enough to be positive going forward, and that’s without including any additional handicapping.

If we update the full tables, and what the heck, include the 1990 season as well, here’s what you are looking at:

Some explanation is necessary: the off win/loss refers to the team’s last game prior to the bye, and in games with a pick’em line, we consider that a home underdog/away favorite situation.

Overall the snap answer is the bye week has little influence over spread results, as teams off a bye have covered a near-normal 48.9% of the time. However, once we start breaking it out there are some zones as alluded to above where the situation can be profitable. You can also find some oddities in extreme splits, like a team off a bye that lost its last game by less than a touchdown is 35-16, but losing by more than a touchdown shows a 38-53 record.

We’ve still only be looking at one side of the equation though, since lines and public perception are influenced so significantly by recent outcomes, so let’s pull up another grid measuring performance based on both the bye team and non-bye team last game result (straight-up):

A couple more peculiarities to note: home favorites off a bye and following a 7+ point win in their last game are just 2-13 against the line facing a team that also won its last game. Also of note: in cases where the bye team lost its last game and its opponent won, the bye team is 26-8 when the last loss was by less than 7 points, but 21-40 when losing by a touchdown or more!

The problem of course with many of these kinds of statistics is that they don’t really have the sample size to be convincing going forward, and are manufactured after we’ve seen the history, rather than conceived and then tested. This is why it is often better to stick with the more general case situation than go the ‘extra mile’.

(And yes, perhaps the most popular ‘bye angle’ is play a team off a bye that is winless on the season so far. Yup, that’s been solid over the years.)

Ultimately it appears there is some value to using the "back from a bye" factor in your handicapping analysis…just probably not in the way and to the extent you might have thought!