CFB Mythbusters: Do bye weeks help or hurt your team?

This is a brief research, which makes sense a lot. Remember our losing records after bye week under Jimbo.
Key points are (all quotes below):

1. There's not much separating bye-weeks from regular weeks, regardless of the opponent strength.
2. The win rate against particularly tough opponents was slightly better coming off a bye week than they were normally.
3. The teams that have benefitted most from the bye week over the past 20 years are tu, Oregon St., Arizona, and Virginia
4. The teams most hurt by the bye week are Ole Miss, Michigan State, and Penn State (A&M is not included but the Bye-week effects graph shows most of SEC teams are likely to be in this category).

Hate say but coaches need to spy what tu has done during the bye week.

gaudiz said:

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CFB Mythbusters: Do bye weeks help or hurt your team?

This is a brief research, which makes sense a lot. Remember our losing records after bye week under Jimbo.
Key points are (all quotes below):

1. There's not much separating bye-weeks from regular weeks, regardless of the opponent strength.
2. The win rate against particularly tough opponents was slightly better coming off a bye week than they were normally.
3. The teams that have benefitted most from the bye week over the past 20 years are tu, Oregon St., Arizona, and Virginia
4. The teams most hurt by the bye week are Ole Miss, Michigan State, and Penn State (A&M is not included but the Bye-week effects graph shows most of SEC teams are likely to be in this category).

Hate say but coaches need to spy what tu has done during the bye week.

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**insert ref wearing t.u sweatshirt**

Why do we call them bye weeks? A bye is specific to tournament play in which a team earns the right to bypass the first round by earning a higher seed. In the regular season they're just open dates.

It's bc we have to say "Bye" to them for a week

I believe our off week came at a very nice time in the season. We are in good position to work out the rest of the schedule with a healthy QB and fairly healthy roster

I think bye weeks benefit home teams more than away teams. A bye week didn't help Missouri or Tennessee, but they were playing road games at Texas A&M and Arkansas respectively after bye weeks. In contrast, Vanderbilt had a bye week before a home game against Alabama, who was coming off a thrilling 41-34 home win over Georgia. That's why I think bye weeks benefit the home teams more than the road teams. Of course, it obviously didn't benefit South Carolina before a home game against Ole Miss, who was coming off a disappointing 20-17 loss to Kentucky.

I think our first bye week came at a great time, allowing our team to rest, recover and prepare for the challenges ahead. With momentum on our side, a solid two weeks of practice will put us in strong position for our next 3 games before our second bye week, but I don't like the timing of our second bye week because we will be playing cupcake New Mexico State on 11/16 after that bye week. I wish our second bye week was before our road game at Auburn on 11/23.

I'm pretty sure the only way a bye week can hurt a team is if you have a coach who uses it as an excuse to blow off routine and go nurse his hangover with some hair of the dog.

Not going to look it up, but I believe we'd always play Tech after they had a bye and they would win. Seemed like we had a lot in the big 12 after week 2 or 3. Maybe I'm misremembering, but sounds right.

Craigy said:

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I believe our off week came at a very nice time in the season. We are in good position to work out the rest of the schedule with a healthy QB and fairly healthy roster

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I would have much rather it come after State. We had a great game against Missouri let's continue that momentum and give Conner more confidence then have a break.

Not a coach.

But if I was, my biggest concern during a bye week would be arrests.

I'd keep them in town and have a 8a Saturday scrimmage...

Didn't look at the methodology, however, IMHO the quality of the post-bye week opponent probably has the most impact on winning or losing.

Sips in big12 would most likely play an inferior opponent. Same with Or State and AZ playing in a declining Pac12. The three with the worst results were in B1G and SEC and likely playing tougher opponents.

It seems logical that if you have some guys nursing minor injuries not playing for a couple weeks would be good.

Gator92 said:

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Not a coach.

But if I was, my biggest concern during a bye week would be arrests.

I'd keep them in town and have a 8a Saturday scrimmage...

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We know why you're not a coach.

Ag in ATL said:

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Didn't look at the methodology, however, IMHO the quality of the post-bye week opponent probably has the most impact on winning or losing.

Sips in big12 would most likely play an inferior opponent. Same with Or State and AZ playing in a declining Pac12. The three with the worst results were in B1G and SEC and likely playing tougher opponents.

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Exactly what I was thinking

For the record, I'm of the opinion that bye weeks help if you have a lot of injuries but can hurt by making you rusty

Media thinks bye weeks are good because they are thinking that a team can put in extra wrinkles with the extra time to prepare

First bye week at the halfway point sitting 3-0 in conference should be a good thing for us.

• Allows us to heal up any nagging injuries for the next 3 game stretch of Miss St., LSU, USCe
• The players and scheme against Mizzou looked liked the new systems had finally clicked and were running smooth. Bye week followed by Miss St. allows us 3 weeks to start adding onto the new schemes for LSU / USCe.
• It breaks up the last half of the season into (2) 3 week stretches with the second bye week coming before New Mexico St., Auburn, and tu. which is about as good as it gets for a team sitting 5-1 and only having a loss to a top 10 team and vying for the playoffs.

If we make it through the next 3 week stretch, look out. We'll then have another 3 weeks to get healthy again and start adding schemes while preparing for tu to end the season.

Aggie Dad Sip said:

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Why do we call them bye weeks? A bye is specific to tournament play in which a team earns the right to bypass the first round by earning a higher seed. In the regular season they're just open dates.

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Let's call it a "one week timeout"

They benefit all parties involved. It's not even remotely debatable.

Does that always guarantee/translate to a win coming out of them? Of course now, but there are tons of things players and coaches get caught up on during a bye week: school, rest, film, a trip home, watching games, hanging with friends, tending to injuries, extra prep, etc. The list goes on and on.

Nobody knows. How can you tie good performance or bad performance to the bye week and not some other factor or factors that went on?

gaudiz said:

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CFB Mythbusters: Do bye weeks help or hurt your team?

This is a brief research, which makes sense a lot. Remember our losing records after bye week under Jimbo.
Key points are (all quotes below):

1. There's not much separating bye-weeks from regular weeks, regardless of the opponent strength.
2. The win rate against particularly tough opponents was slightly better coming off a bye week than they were normally.
3. The teams that have benefitted most from the bye week over the past 20 years are tu, Oregon St., Arizona, and Virginia
4. The teams most hurt by the bye week are Ole Miss, Michigan State, and Penn State (A&M is not included but the Bye-week effects graph shows most of SEC teams are likely to be in this category).

Hate say but coaches need to spy what tu has done during the bye week.

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I knew it would come out. Do as tu does! Let's don't have any ideas of our own!!!!

Routines matter in football. Replacing the missing game in the routine so players don't let up is impossible. Because then it really is just st practice…

Data is from 2000 to 2019. And t.u. is WAY WAY above everyone else:

I think it's because they have had superior talent during that time but terrible coaching. While other coaching staffs can develop a good game plan in a week and execute it, t.u. staffs needed longer to put together a good game plan. They won a lot of game on talent, but were almost unbeatable when they had talent and the coaches actually dedicated time to planning/scouting/coaching effectively. Just a theory though.

Craigy said:

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I believe our off week came at a very nice time in the season. We are in good position to work out the rest of the schedule with a healthy QB and fairly healthy roster

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Personally I'm excited about this off-week to destress from my BAS, play a 2-day golf tourney, and watch a lot of great games without any stress.

I think for every factor you could try to measure, you could argue as much potential downside as upside, except for one: Time to get minor injuries healed.

TU benefitted the most because they had the conference commissioner in their pocket. They always had the preferred bye weeks, they would get it before the OU game and before they played us. It was purely intentional.

Since 1978, Texas A&M is 38-32 (54.2%) after a bye. During this same time period, Texas A&M is 360-205-3 (63.4%) overall. So we tend to do worse.

Lots of these games were against Arkansas in the 80s, they won 8 of 11.
Alabama beat us 3 times in '15, '16, '19.
t.u. outscored us 9 times out of 12 games from 1996 to 2008.

After byes, we are 7-20 on the road and 31-12 at home.

Might be worth noting that the Horns were coming off their own bye week 8 of these 12 meetings. In games where both teams are meeting after a bye week, Texas A&M is 5-9.

During bye weeks some players choose to travel to nearby colleges or larger cities and sometimes may make some bad choices. That doesn't happen in Austin because they don't have to travel.

Not all bye weeks are created equally.

It does not appear that they broke down whether both teams had byes or just one.

I know a lot of the big games like bama vs lsu have both teams coming off byes. Sip and BlowU are this year.


Like they said though, there really aren't enough data points to see any real trends.