Skip to main content
Bear Digest

The Surprising Way NFL Views Key Scheduling Quirk Favoring Bears

No team in the league has a better "rest differential" with their schedule this year than Chicago. The league has examined what this can mean and it's stunning.
Gene Chamberlain|
One game when the Bears owned a distinct preparation and rest time edge last year was the win over Washington, but it didn't always work out that way.
One game when the Bears owned a distinct preparation and rest time edge last year was the win over Washington, but it didn't always work out that way. | Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

If you're looking at the so-called "rest advantage" the Bears have over opponents with their 2026 schedule, it's probably better to take it for what it is and not what fans want it to be.

It's a minor part of a massive puzzle known as an 18-week schedule. In fact, there is one source fairly close to the entire situation who examined rest, and calls it no edge at all. This would be the National Football League.

Explaining it all, the Bears have a plus-15 advantage for differential between days off and days lost to prepare for games and what their opponents have. The Bears play only one Monday night game and that's a plus one week but a minus one day the next week. They have two Thursday games, a real negative one week, but a plus the next week with preparation.

No teams they play are coming off an outright bye week this season. The Bears are the only team with this distinction. Logically, that must be some sort of advantage.

Not so, says the NFL.

Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer explored the creation of this year's NFL schedule with a column and one of the nuggets uncovered is how little importance the league attaches to days off. Breer got this information talking to Mike Lopez, the NFL's senior director of football data and analytics. Needless to say, the players union might think differently about those days off.

"One critical statistic was that the 23 teams that have come off international games to play the next week (without a bye) went 13–10, with a plus-2.7 point differential," Breer wrote after talking to Lopez. "They also ran numbers that showed rest wasn’t a significant factor, one way or the other, in win percentage or point differential."

It wasn't as if Breer went into this with an agenda and found some sculpted statistic to support or oppose his thoughts on the importance of rest. It was an objective inquiry.

The league considered everything when making out the schedule and deems it of little or no consequence. Apparently that Bears plus-15 in rest differential means little.

More important is how teams make use of the extra time they might have to prepare for an opponent during a week. A coaching staff with extra time and a plan for putting this to use can help its cause.

This is a very subjective thing not easily determined by some analytic looking at it from the outside.

In fact, if you examine how extra time off and less time off affected the Bears, it didn't support what the NFL's stats said about getting time off.

Bears time impact evident, not decisive

When the Bears had less than the regular week of time to prepare for an opponent last season, they had a 3-1 record. They had two other games when they had less time than an opponent but still had more than a week to get ready and they split those two games.

Four Bears opponents last year had an extra day or more to prepare for the Bears and in every case they beat the Bears. This included the playoffs. The Ravens, Packers, Lions and Rams in the divisional round all had an extra day, but the Rams didn't really have an edge with the extra day to prepare because the Bears also had an extra day to prepare.

In the opposite case, the Bears' opponents had a 1-2 record when they came in with at least a day less prep time. The lone team that won after having less time to prepare was the 49ers.

The bottom line is the Bears usually know what they're doing with their prep time when given less time, but when they get more rest than normal it doesn't appear to give them any type of advantage. This neither proves no disproves the league's numbers. As for opponents, they were far more effective with the extra time.

For that reason, rest's impact appears to be a more subjective situation or not what the NFL official suggests.

Consider it like this: The better teams with better coaching staffs will compensate for any preparation or rest time disadvantage. The weaker teams or teams with less competent staffs will not. That's common sense.

You don’t need NFL analytics to tell you this much, and none of this says the Bears are going to enjoy an edge of any sort over an 18-week schedule based on when they or opponents last played.

What really matters is simply being better.

X: BearsOnSI

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Loading recommendations... Please wait while we load personalized content recommendations

Published
Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.

Home/News