Whatever you think about the old rest vs. rust debate, the NFL believes the possible perceived advantage either side might have doesn’t matter — and it has the data to back that up.
Following the unveiling of the 2026 NFL regular season schedule, one of the details scrutinized for fairness is rest disparity, which measures how much time a team has to prepare for a given game, compared to its opponent. All 32 teams have 17 games in 18 weeks, so there’s a balance in that — you’d think every team has one week with an extra week of rest and preparation compared to the team they’re facing, but that logically evens out when an opponent is coming off their bye.
That doesn’t happen evenly, however. The Philadelphia Eagles and Los Angeles Chargers each have four games this season where their opponent is coming off its bye week, and the Las Vegas Raiders have three such games, while 14 NFL teams never have to face an opponent well-rested after its bye week.
About 40% of NFL games have one team with a day or more of additional rest than its opponent. Add in games where one team is coming off a Thursday kickoff and the other a normal Sunday game, and the imbalance can be substantial. The Chicago Bears, for instance, have a plus-15 rest differential, which is to say they have 15 more days to prepare for their games than their opponents. The Chargers are at the other extreme, with a minus-24 differential — between the two, the net net, if you will, is a difference of 39 days of rest and preparation.
Justin Herbert, Jim Harbaugh and the Chargers have four games against teams coming off a bye in 2026, tied for the most in the league. (Photo by Brooke Sutton/Getty Images)
Yet, when one NFL executive was pressed about the issue after the regular-season schedule release, NFL vice president of broadcast planning Mike North said the league has data showing there’s no advantage to having extra rest.
“We’ve got a really robust data and analytics team here in the office … and they have been very clear with us, that rest disparity is not a thing,” North said during a remarkably thorough 100-minute conference call with reporters Friday morning. “You do not have a competitive advantage when you’re coming off your bye, and you certainly don’t have a competitive advantage when you’re one day, two days or three days more well-rested. If the data suggest that there’s a there there, we will adjust. We absolutely will.
“But we’ve been very conscious, we’ve been very careful, and we’ve been very connected with our data team … [they] have been adamant that rest disparity does not impact performance, expected win percentage, expected points scored.”
Sure enough, if you look at every game where one team is coming off a bye and its opponent is not over the last two seasons, those teams are combined 27-27. Teams with the bye week advantage went 14-12 in 2025 and 13-15 in 2024. So, both seasons were within a single win of a coin flip, and combined they’re 27-27, suggesting there is no advantage at all.
Even over the course of a full season, teams that have had some bad rest luck have exceeded expectations. Of the 28 teams with the most extreme rest differential disparities since 2002, 18 of them went over their projected win total, per Sumer Sports. One of those teams nearly won a Super Bowl as well, with the San Francisco 49ers having a minus-19 rest day differential in 2023.
The 49ers won the NFC title in 2023 after having the worst rest disadvantage in the league. (Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images)
The perception is certainly there. One team has two weeks to focus solely on its game plan, and the other has just one. That’s also in addition to the added physical recovery to get players back from injuries and generally catch up on rest. NFL teams, and their fans, notice when they should have this advantage, and understandably complain when they don’t.
“I won’t hide the fact that the teams are aware, and have long memories, and remind us,” North said. “What we’re really trying to focus on is the data: Is there a competitive advantage to playing a team when you’re coming off your bye week? I would have told you not that long ago, the answer was clearly ‘Yes.’ I remember [longtime NFL executive] Howard Katz having a real commitment one year to really trying to avoid or at least minimize a team having to play a road game … when you have to travel to a more well-rested team, it was something like the visiting team won 38% of the time, instead of 44% of the time. A 20% impact on win percentage is relevant, and that was absolutely something that, for several years in a row, we were very, very cognizant of, and writing rules in the software to prevent. If you check the math, it’s flipped.”
The NFL’s CBA now requires teams on a bye to give players a full four consecutive days off during a bye week, so while coaches have more time to prepare a game plan, they’re still implementing the same one-week timeframe for the most part. It brings back the rest vs. rust argument, whether a team that has a long weekend out of its facility and meeting rooms gains more in the break than it loses by breaking out of routine and schedule and the normal rhythm of preparing for a game every week.
Two analysts for the NFL, Mike Lopez and Tom Bliss, wrote a paper in 2024 titled “Bye-bye, bye advantage: estimating the competitive impact of rest differential in the National Football League,” laying out their research. Before the Collective Bargaining Agreement that was agreed to in 2011, teams coming off a bye had a 2.2-point advantage on other teams. But once the CBA mandated time away from the team for players, that advantage lessened, suggesting the edge was in additional practice time, not just time to rest and prepare. Their estimate in the 2024 paper was that teams coming off a bye week have a 0.3-point advantage, nearly negligible in a game’s outcome.
There’s another argument to be made. Essentially, well-coached teams will be well-coached regardless of how much prep time they have, and poorly coached teams will still be poorly coached even with an extra week of poor coaching. Whether that will play out in this year’s results remains to be seen, but the last two seasons show the impact of one team having an extra week yielding the same .500 overall record as the entire league has over an entire season.
“I’m sure the Chargers are a little disappointed,” North said. “But I’d remind them that a few years ago, I think it was the 49ers who had the [worst] rest disparity in the league at a minus-22 or something like that, and went to a Super Bowl. So good teams overcome challenges to the extent that rest disparity might be one, but our data does not support that that is a competitive disadvantage.”
