Bills have the biggest rest disadvantage in 2025 among playoff contenders

[Sojourner]

We apparently had a cakewalk of a schedule coming into the season, now that people think the wheels are falling off it’s time to clutch at straws and find a reason they’ve been and possibly could be at the end of some losses.

 

i am not advocating you are making an excuse in any way yourself as it is advantageous to have a bye then play but rather focus on the first point that it was a fortuitous season before week 1. Most teams play 2 and sometimes 3 opponents after their bye week or a long week due to Thursday Night Football nowadays. We got 2 of those games… so a bye week and two 11 day rests. 
 

Team just hasn’t played the football they are capable of. 
 

 

[ClosetFan]

8 hours ago, Low Positive said:

We didn’t get a bye before the chiefs game, unless you count the Panthers as a defacto bye week. 

In effect we did get a bye because the Chiefs had a short week to prepare, then had to travel for the next game.

[Sierra Foothills]

8 hours ago, transplantbillsfan said:

I got to thinking about this because I was thinking ahead to the Patriots game when we play a division rival coming off their bye... which sucks.

 

We also played the Falcons coming off their bye.  We know how that went.

 

We also played another division rival in the Dolphins coming off a Thursday night game with an extra 4 days of rest.

 

And ya know what, we're going to play another big conference game against the Bengals where they're coming off a Thanksgiving Thursday Night Football game.

 

Yes, the Bills benefitted from the bye week coming in to play the lowly Panthers and a Saints team we got extra rest for after a TNF game  and will benefit from playing on TNF next week against the Steelers, but we have 2 divisional road games this year where we are scheduled with a rest disadvantage.  

 

All rest disadvantages against conference opponents except the Steelers.

 

 

By itself, I wouldn't really cry foul, but the Bills are -7 in rest disadvantage days for the whole season.  The next closest AFC teams even remotely contending for an AFC playoff spot are the Steelers and Browns both at -4 followed by the Texans at -2.  All the other AFC contenders for the playoffs have a rest advantage with the Jags (if we wanna call them a contender) at +1, the Chiefs and Patriots at +2, the Bengals and Colts at +3 and the Ravens and Chargers at +5.

 

Those are just the contenders for playoffs in the AFC.  To show the disparity in rest advantages, there's a 32 day difference from the team with the greatest rest advantage in the Lions at +13 to the team with the biggest rest disadvantage in the Raiders at -19.

 

And yes... gotta go out and win the games you play... but I guarantee statistically it's significantly more advantageous to play a team with a rest advantage rather than a rest disadvantage.  You would really think in a league that touts its own parity, they would really be trying to make the schedule a little more equal than a 32 day rest disparity from top to bottom.

 

Thanks for doing the research.

 

I always appreciate when posters put some actual work into a post.

 

I do feel sorry for the Raiders. They're trying to rebuild and in a league where the majority of games are one score or less, the minus 19 is a significant handicap.

 

Edited 33 minutes ago by Sierra Foothills