Conventional wisdom would argue that teams that have a bye week closer to the middle of the season have an advantage. As the line of thought goes, it’s more important to play your best football in November and December, and it may be much harder for a team to play well down the stretch if they have had game the last 12 weekends.
Then again, when is conventional wisdom ever right? The evidence is strong that the Washington Redskins season may benefit enormously from having a bye week between their third and fourth games, while other teams have to wait.
Reason #1: Player development. For players and coaches alike, the NFL season is seen as an epic grind, that is they find themselves so busy during the season, that they do not have adequate time to spend with their wives and children. So is it any surprise that player performance tends to be unpredictable from week to week, but predictable from year to year? There are a multitude of reasons for this, and a ton of minor variables, but I want to focuses on the few major ones that might cause this outcome.
As a player collect game and practice experience, they will improve. Simply by playing more against NFL competition, NFL players improve. However, very few players (if any) have the skill to improve week to week. When you hear that commentator say that “Player X is a gamer who gets better every week”, understand that this commentator is just filling air, and really isn’t saying that he thinks this player improves differently from the majority of NFL talent.
While consistent and noticeable improvement is not possible to evaluate on a week to week basis, it doesn’t take an NFL scout to see that Eli Manning is a much improved QB over last season. Manning didn’t necessarily work harder this offseason than any other, its just that all the information he collected in his playing career finally put itself together in the offseason. This change is reflected in his demeanor as well as his statistics. Players will often refer to this phenomenon as the “speed of the game slowing down”, which in reality means that they are simply becoming more adapted to the speed of the game.
So what does this have to do with bye weeks? Well, with a week off to digest all thats happened these past three weeks, is it unreasonable to expect Jason Campbell or Carlos Rogers to have an ephiphany? It probably is, but the whole team is likely to make their biggest in season progression as a unit this week. This means that the team that shows up against Detroit on Sunday will likely be our first glimpse into who the 2007 Redskins really are.
Reason #2: Scheduling advantages. Because the Redskins have their bye this week, they will be playing a team in the following week that will not have had time to prepare for this game the way the Redskins have. I’m not even talking about gameplanning, although that is important (and completely unpredictable).
The Lions are in all likelyhood, prone to the same mistakes they have been all season. The last time they went on the road, Philadelphia was able to put 56 points up on them, and the game was over in the first 18 minutes. Not only this week, but the Redskins will line up the next 5 weeks and play teams who have not yet had their bye. When it gets to the Patriots and Jets, this will be a huge advantage for the Redskins. Barring the variable of injuries, the Redskins will be playing at their best, and the Patriots and Jets will not be.
By the end of the season, where your team’s bye week fell will not be a big factor in determining who goes where in January because everyone has a bye week, but at least from a coaching standpoint, knowing what you have in your team for 13 weeks as opposed to 6 is a pretty solid advantage. It is my conclusion that the bye week is a tool of player development, and that not all byes are created equal. The earlier a team has it in a season, the more significant the amount learned from it will be. It’s not exactly a deal breaker, but it will be an advantage in the immediate future, and in a league with only 16 games, that advantage can be decisive.
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