Back in 2019, I wrote a couple of articles for IL Indoor about doubleheader weekends. The first dealt with how often teams won the first and second games of doubleheaders, while the second looked more into how home floor advantage plays into this. The obvious next step would have been to see how bye weekends affect teams but for some reason, I never went there. Let’s go there now.

Aside: For those of you new to this blog, welcome! I used to write stats-related articles like this one all the time for both this blog and for IL Indoor. A list of all the articles I wrote for IL Indoor (and a few for Lacrosse Flash) is here.

Over the years, I have heard many players lament the “bye” week. Particularly near the end of the season if they’re in a playoff hunt, players just want to keep playing. Sitting at home watching other teams play is very difficult. On the other hand, if you have players who have minor injuries, a week off can be very helpful. But in general, does that week off help you or hurt you? Let’s see if we can find out.

I went through each team in the league and for each game they played, I went through the following criteria:

1. Not a playoff game
2. The team did not play a game less than 10 days before this one
3. The team DID play a game more than 10 days before this one in the same season. This is to avoid including the team’s first game of a season in the calculation.

Games that matches all three were kept, the rest were tossed. For all teams combined, I found a total of 831 games. Some of these games might be repeated if both teams happened to be coming off of a bye, but that won’t affect the calculation. Of these 831 games, the team with the bye went 409-422 overall. With a sample size that big, only being 13 games under .500 implies that the difference is pretty small. But if we break it down a little further, we do see a bigger difference.

Teams who had a bye week followed by a home game went 248-223 in those games, while teams with a bye week followed by an away game went 161-199. Let’s compare that with teams that did not have a bye the previous week (reverse criterion #2 above), and the home/away split overall:

	Record	Winning percentage
Bye followed by home game	248-223	.527
No bye followed by home game	898-698	.563
All home games	1146-921	.554
Bye followed by away game	161-199	.447
No bye followed by away game	756-944	.445
All away games	917-1143	.445

(For all of these rows, a team’s first game of the season is excluded, just so we’re comparing apples to apples.)

So what does this tell us? Teams playing a home game coming off a bye week had a lower winning percentage in that game than home games in general. That difference is quite significant: .527 with the bye and .563 without.

However, teams playing an away game coming off a bye week had a slightly higher winning percentage than away games in general, but only slightly. A winning percentage of .445 vs. .447 is one game difference (if they had gone 160-200, that’d be .444).

The conclusion:

Bye weeks do not help you.

If you have a bye week followed by an away game, the week off makes almost no difference. You’re just as likely to win as if you played the previous week. If you have a bye week followed by a home game, you are still more likely to win than to lose, but you’re not as likely to win as if you played the previous week.

And of course, this is situational. In general, bye weeks don’t help you but I’m sure there have been cases where, like I said earlier, some players were banged up and the extra week allowed them recover and help their team win.

So it appears that the players who lamented the bye week were right.