Does the Bye Week Help the Vikings?
The Vikings are coming off their bye week after a hard-fought Week 5 victory over the New York Jets in London, leading up to a pivotal Week 7 divisional matchup against the defending NFC North division champion Detroit Lions.
How much does the extra rest help the Vikings’ odds?
To answer this, I looked at the win-loss records of every team in the week immediately following a bye week from 2002 (when the league expanded to 32 teams) through 2023. The result is a record of 378-322-4, for a winning percentage of 54.0%.
For comparison, in that same time period (2002-2023), the home team won about 56.3% of the total games played. In other words, the post-bye week advantage is slightly smaller than the home-field advantage, but it is still substantial.
Furthermore, teams that play at home coming off their bye week (like the Vikings this Sunday) have been 214-139-2 since 2002, with a whopping 60.6% winning percentage. In other words, the post-bye week advantage and home-field advantage seem to have a synergistic effect, resulting in a huge boost to a team’s odds of winning.
All of this is great news for the Vikings, but is it possible that their bye week was coming too early? Might it be better for the team to have a later bye week?
As can be seen from the plot below, there does not seem to be an enormous advantage to a later bye, at least as measured by the regular season winning percentage. Teams with byes in week 5-6 tend to have slightly smaller winning percentages than teams with byes in weeks 7-11, but on the other hand, teams with byes in week 4 have had a higher winning percentage than any of them.
The dataset is very noisy, and it gets even noisier once we include byes in weeks 12 and beyond, which have larger error bars because the historical sample size of teams with late-season byes is smaller. Furthermore, it is also possible that any week-to-week discrepancies may be caused by the NFL’s algorithm for determining when teams take their bye weeks, which is far from random.
In short, there is no convincing evidence that a later bye is an advantage to a team’s regular season winning percentage, and Vikings fans can rejoice that their bye week came right before what is arguably the biggest game of the season.
The bye week advantage may be especially big for the Vikings this season, given that it may allow just enough time for the return of tight end T.J. Hockenson. Hockenson suffered a torn ACL and MCL in last season’s Christmas Eve loss against the Lions and has been sidelined ever since.
Hockenson is one of the league’s top pass-catching TEs, and his return will open up a new dimension for the Vikings’ passing attack. After a dismal showing against the Jets, this could be just what the Vikings’ offense needs to hit their peak when they need it most.
Anything can happen on any given Sunday in the NFL, but the combination of rest, home-field advantage, and (hopefully) Hockenson give the Vikings the clear edge in the game this Sunday.
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