mykc14 wrote:I would say that an inequality definitely exists as the Hawks play 4 teams coming off of their Bye. 1 Team (Washington) plays 3 teams. 4 Teams play 2 Teams coming off of their bye. On the other side of the coin, a whopping 9 teams play 0 teams coming off of their bye.30 of 32 teams play at least half as many games against teams coming off of their byes as the Hawks. I found 2 other years as I was looking through that article, through links, and found that the Hawks had the 2nd and 3rd most games against teams with extra rest those years (2012 and 2013).
As far as the 10 day rest vs. 14 day rest I don't know if it is an advantage or not, but I know that I would rather play a team good team with those extra days of rest. There is no real tangible reason why having more rest (14 days) wouldn't give you some sort of an advantage. There are a lot of 'maybes.' Maybe the extra days off get teams out of their rhythm. Maybe it takes a half a game to get back to 'game-speed' after the layoff, I don't know but there has to at some level be an advantage to extra days off and it could be that 14 days is too much and 10 allows for the extra game planning but not the loss in rhythm. It also could be nothing and there is absolutely no advantage to having those days off. Personally, I like when the Hawks have a little extra time to heal up and game plan for their next opponent because it seems like a slight advantage to me.
There are a lot things that we don't hear coaching complaining about but that doesn't mean that they aren't. After reading about the whole 'spygate' thing it seems like a lot of teams were complaining about what the Pats were doing but we didn't really hear anything about it. Let my ask you this: Do you think it is fair that the NFL says East coast teams traveling to the West coast on back to back weeks creates a competitive disadvantage for those East coast teams but does not offer that West coast teams would be at the same type of competitive disadvantage?
Like I mentioned earlier, you really can't count the Arizona game as facing a team coming off a bye as we were coming off one ourselves, so that puts our number down to 3, and if you are going to want me to believe in your theory, you're going to have to come up with some empirical data that proves that there's a performance difference. The link I posted earlier goes back 5 years, times 32 teams is 160 games. A 52% winning percentage doesn't seem much more than you would expect from plain old random coin tosses, every once in awhile, heads is going to come up a little more often than tails. The NFL has enough variables they have to account for when they come up with a master schedule without worrying about red herring issues like facing teams coming off of bye weeks.
Coaches discussing scandals between each other differ from debates about NFL rules and procedures. I can see how a lot of fellow coaches were reluctant to complain about one of their own, afraid to make accusations without hard facts, yet still whisper about it to one another. It's sort of like talking about your boss's wife cheating. You'd rather someone else go public about it. On the other hand, teams have been traveling from the PT to ET for decades. If it were truly that big of a deal to teams, it would have surfaced in more circles other than a couple of fan bases. Pete said once that he addresses it by coming out a day earlier, but even that seems like overkill to me. Again, if you can show me some hard evidence, I'm more likely to buy in. But that one's going to be a little more complicated as unlike coming off a bye, the travel issue obviously only happens in road games, so you will have to factor in overall road winning percentage vs. games on the east coast, plus you're going to have to account for the fact that the NFC East and AFC East have had some pretty lousy teams over the past few years compared to other divisions in other time zones. The bye week thing is easier to prove or disprove because it's completely random relative to who the opponent is.
If they made west coast teams travel to the east coast on back-to-back weekends, then you would have a point. But they don't. They should have worded the process differently, something like no back-to-back trips crossing 3 time zones for any team then it would have sounded more equitable. But I do agree that they caved in to the Steelers and Giants and owe us a favor. Damn Steelers haven't had to come to our house for a long, long time. I don't think Worthlessburger ever has played out here.