Is the Bye-Week Advantage a Myth?
The WSJ investigates whether teams fare better or worse following a bye week, and finds that over the past 8 years, major conference teams coming off a bye week have a losing record. However, SEC teams have a .500 record after bye weeks.
over 1 year ago
Lawboy
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Would prefer to see the records of of each team versus an entire conference.
If Vandy, Indiana, Miss St all get byes before playing teams like Alabama, Ohio St, and LSU , well then the bye week doesn’t matter as much because of the talent difference. Think it just depends on the bye week matchup.
AND the fact there are Six of them....last year three was bad enough.
Bama's Pluck and Grit have Writ Her Name in Crimson Flame
by TideFanAtlanta on Oct 15, 2010 9:47 AM CDT up reply actions
Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t just dismiss statistical data, but it’s important to think about any confounding factors. Bigcdiddy16 brought up the issue of talent differences. There are so many things that affect the outcome of a game other than whether a team had a bye or not. If anything, maybe a comparison of a random sample of post-bye games and non-post-bye games for similar teams (say, top 20 vs top 20 or some such) would be better. Not sure though.
"You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But there's nothing funny about vapor lock! It's the third most common cause of cars stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked!" -Joe Namath
by billycthulhu on Oct 15, 2010 10:36 AM CDT up reply actions
What in the world is going on
with the strikethroughs today? Is it an SBNation thing or is someone accidently doing something to make it do this? Is not just in the posts, it is everything in the sidebars too.
It even does it in the preview mode before I post this…
Losing doesn't make me want to quit. It makes me want to fight that much harder. – Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant
by BamaGirlinDallas on Oct 14, 2010 4:32 PM CDT reply actions
Heh. That is a clever way to make everyone’s comments after yours look blocked-out.
I'm wrong all the time.
Weird. This has happened twice now in recent threads
"You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But there's nothing funny about vapor lock! It's the third most common cause of cars stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked!" -Joe Namath
by billycthulhu on Oct 15, 2010 10:32 AM CDT up reply actions
It seems like a lot of teams choose their bye week
to have extra time to prepare for a tougher opponent. Depending on how prevalent that practice is, that could really bring down the winning percentage.
To an extent, sure
But a lot of it is also just what the conference gives them. You have so many dates to pick a bye week from (as opposed to OOC games) and so most often people pick the game around the middle of the season. And for some reason the SEC put a lot of mid-season options prior to Alabama games. Well, also Little Brother wanted an off-week before playing us.
"You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But there's nothing funny about vapor lock! It's the third most common cause of cars stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked!" -Joe Namath
by billycthulhu on Oct 15, 2010 12:51 PM CDT up reply actions
Right, some teams aren't going to have good choices.
Auburn is a good example of a team with better choices. They could have scheduled their bye in week 10, closing the season with Georgia-cupcake-Bama, instead of playing 11 strait games without a bye.
LSU could have had a bye in week 7, effectively splitting the season in half. Instead, they chose week 9 prior to playing us. Now they may have chosen week 9 over week 7 solely because they felt it was better to rest up for the home stretch of the season, or they could have thought that having an extra week to prepare for Bama was worth extending the first half of the season.
Another thing biases the win/loss percentage regardless of conscious scheduling choices: when is a team ever going to schedule an OoC cupcake after a bye? There is hardly even an opportunity to do that since there are not many instances of back-to-back non-conference play weeks after week 3 of the season.
Your third point is right on the money
I hadn’t thought of that. I would think it could certainly be a contributing factor. I’m not sure there’s a huge difference between picking week 7 and week 9 but the point is taken that if there isn’t a huge difference, why not schedule the bye before the tougher team? So, there’s at least an element of that to it.
It just comes down to the fact that only looking at total W-L record after a bye week isn’t going to tell you much because there are WAY too many confounding elements involved. You’re never going to get rid of all of them, but I think you could still improve the situation by trying to limit the data to, say, similarly ranked teams. Obviously the accuracy of ranking systems is debatable but I still think it would be better info than just the straight W-L record.
"You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But there's nothing funny about vapor lock! It's the third most common cause of cars stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked!" -Joe Namath
by billycthulhu on Oct 15, 2010 4:01 PM CDT up reply actions
Figuring out whether or not a bye week helps, statistically, is no easier than figuring out which team is best. In fact, understanding the teams’ relative abilities is part and parcel of solving this issue, because scheduling the bye doesn’t guarantee a win, just makes it more likely.
I think the simpler way to look at it is this: you get an extra 7 days to prepare, rest, and practice. That has to help — even just from the stand-point of guys getting more time to heal.
I'm wrong all the time.
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