"There are two sides to every story." Last week we looked at how teams have historically performed the week after a bye, this go-round we’ll update our article from a few years back that looked at how they perform the week before a bye.

While teams coming back from a bye are the subject of a lot of handicapping theories (and for the real truth on this you’ll want to get your hands on last week’s Gaming Today where we presented the actual results against the spread of teams in various circumstances following a bye week), having a bye week coming up is often overlooked as a potential factor in this week’s matchup.

The thinking goes that teams coming off a bye are well rested, healed from injuries, well prepared for the next opponent, and perhaps armed with some new twists in the basic game plan. What would be the comparable assortment of factors for a squad with a week off around the corner? It might include:

• Play through pain: knowing there is a break ahead might lead players to "grin and bear it" for more than the typical NFL punishment doled out to the body every game, understanding that they will have extra recovery time afterwards.

• Extra pressure to get the win/make a good showing: a successful coaching change mid-season is easier to pull off when the new coach comes in with two weeks rather than one to get the new system installed. Consequently coaches on the hot seat may well feel it’s a do or die game prior to the bye.

• Extra pressure on struggling starters to play well and keep their job: just as coaches are more easily replaced during a bye span, so too would it make sense to make a shift in player roles when there’s extra time to make the adjustments. Players looking over their shoulder will want to show up big.

• Go into the "vacation" on an upbeat note: even teams without unusual pressure to win a game will most likely feel a lot better if they can notch the W the week before the bye. Players could feel it will lead to a more relaxed attitude during the off-week, instead of a return to training camp rigors! Coaches can also feel better about backing off a little if things went well in the last game.

Those all seem like plausible enough points, but the contrary view might be that teams will be looking ahead to the break: bad ones viewing it as a chance to regroup, good ones as a well deserved easing up on the hardship of life in the NFL.

In our first pass at analyzing the "pre-bye" situation, we postulated four possible scenarios of note from a spread standpoint:

1. Play against away favorites prior to a bye
2. Play against home favorites off a loss prior to a bye
3. Play against home underdogs off a loss prior to a bye
4. Consider home favorites off a win prior to a bye

These theories were based on testing a ten year span (1991 to 2000). With three new seasons in the books, a first step is to see how blindly playing these angles would have fared.

Playing against all pre-bye away favorites would have netted a 7-5 mark, playing against home favorites off a loss with a bye next was good for a 7-4 record, playing against home underdogs off a loss pre-bye was 12-11, but playing home favorites off a win pre-bye was 6-8. So all told the angles combined for a rather mediocre 32-28 record (53.3%), but that’s still slightly profitable and that’s with zero actual handicapping beyond spotting the situation. If you disregarded the "consider" angle, which was labeled after testing as the weakest situation, you get a more interesting 26-20 (56.5%) performance.

We will update the full charts from before, and throw in the additional year of 1990 to see what the new totals look like for a team against the spread in the week prior to a bye, when facing an opponent that will play the following week:

Some explanation is necessary: the off win/loss refers to the team’s last game prior to the game before the bye.

In looking at the expanded results, the only new development of note is that away underdogs have done fairly well against the line pre-bye, but not to a statistically significant enough level at this stage.

For advancing this research further we will want to examine not just the pre-bye team’s last result, but also the previous outcome for their opponent!

[Note the four columns here will not add up to the totals in the previous table due to odd events like tie games, and opponents having a bye in the week prior to this matchup.]

This expanded look doesn’t change the outlook on the original three angles that much, although you might prefer to find home dogs off a loss versus an opponent off a win. There’s any number of additional queries we could run against the database, looking at say the outcomes of the last two games or something, but with each extra slice you reduce the sample size to the point where the reliability of any findings going forward will be low.

So in summary, while the pre-bye state does not display extremely exaggerated results, the three key angles all showed a profit in the recent three years, and may well do so over the next three! This should not be a primary reason to walk up to the counter and place a wager, but if you are leaning to a team anyway, it can be a nice extra assurance that you are backing the right side.