Book of Jobbed #9: Canada is the Bye Week Champion
I was “out of office” (OOO) last week. I’m addicted to my work email and I had to go detox. The doctors weren’t sure I’d make it. To manage my withdrawal symptoms they had to give me the equivalent of methadone—little letters to open that say things like “let’s circle back to this next week” and “I can’t do a call at 1pm how about 2pm?”
At any rate, being OOO got me thinking about bye weeks in the NFL and college football.
Bye weeks, for the uninitiated, are the weeks, usually in the middle of a season, where a team does not play. When teams are historically bad, you’ll often hear jokes like “Detroit Lions Lose to Bye Week.”
A bye week is the closest thing players have to going OOO, but having a bye week is not exactly like taking a vacation. Coaches, players, and other staff members are still rigorously preparing for the next game or set of games. There might be less intensity, but the grind is still on. Coaches will sometimes say their team was the “champion of the bye week.” They are usually and rightfully made fun of for this coachism.
Owners of fantasy football teams hate bye weeks. If their fake rosters include too many players on one real team, they’re screwed. They call it bye week hell. Hence the T-shirt.
In the real world, there’s some debate about whether or not a bye week helps a team the following week. In the college game, the answers is that byes provide no statistically significant advantage—unless you’re the Texas Longhorns. Then it really helps for some reason (As an aside, the number of bye weeks in college football varies from year to year based on when Labor Day falls on the calendar.)
In the NFL, teams playing an away game after a bye week tend to do better than teams playing an away game after not having a bye week. This makes some sense intuitively. Having that extra week to rest will steel you against the perils of a hotel bed. But home teams coming off a bye week tend to do worse than their non-bye-week’d counterparts. This also makes some intuitive sense. Maybe being home for that long makes it harder to get back into the groove? Who’s to say.
The NFL started bye weeks in the 1960s when they had an odd number of teams. Everybody got one bye, but they were not evenly distributed. You could get yours during the first week of the season or the last week of the season, meaning two teams each year effectively did not get a bye.
Byes weeks in the NFL went away after an additional team entered the league, evening up the numbers. But bye weeks returned in the 90s! Why? So they could extend the season to 16 games, increasing the number of games they could sell to television networks and bump up the revenue line in Quickbooks.
Looking at bye weeks is a good time to stop and compare America and Americans to those overseas— it’s often remarked upon that Americans work too many hours compared to those in peer countries with developed economies. Is this the same true of football?
“Where the hell are you going with this, Dan,” you must’ve just aggressively said aloud, confusing passersby and making one or two of them wonder if you are experiencing. “How can you possibly compare American football players to football players overseas? They don’t have football. It’s a unique artifact of American barbarity!”
Wrong! Barbarity is not unique to America!
There is a league in Japan called the X-League that has been around since the 1970s. Europeans started their own gridiron football league in 2021. It’s mostly a German league, but it technically has teams across the continent. The sport’s also gaining popularity in Italy. The continued financial stability of these leagues might be questionable and these examples might only be former Axis powers, but they’re helping me make my point so I’m not going to analyze that too closely!
People often also forget that our neighbors to the north have their own pro-league: The Canadian Football League. It is the second most popular professional football league in the world, making it our best point of comparison to the NFL. You might vaguely remember hearing about it at some point. It’s something a Vegas casino will let you bet on without having to check with a manager first. It’s also less depressing than watching the Vancouver Canucks play hockey.
The Canadian Football League season is 21-weeks long with three bye weeks. Teams are only playing for around 85% of the season. Compare that to the NFL season, which is 18-weeks long and there is one bye week. Teams are playing for 95% of the season!
I do not know what the teams in the Canadian Football League are doing during that extra ten percent of weeks where they don’t have a game, but I I presume they are getting time off to enjoy stupid lame things like life, nature, and universal healthcare.