In two weeks, No. 1 Alabama hosts current No. 8 Texas A&M in Tuscaloosa. It’ll be a battle between the two best teams in the SEC, and it will surely be fun.
Texas A&M gets a bye before facing Alabama. How much will that help?
There’s evidence that bye weeks improve a team’s performance by a couple points. That’s usually not enough against the Tide.
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But the teams will enter that week from different places. A&M will come off this upcoming week’s bye, while Alabama will spend the week squatting several tons worth of Tennessee – still the SEC East’s favorite after a good-luck comeback turned tough-luck loss against A&M this weekend.
If you spend enough time frequenting the college football internet, you’ve maybe picked up that Alabama fans are tired of this. The Tide do tend, it appears, to play more games against teams coming off bye weeks than most of their peers.
From our Roll Bama Roll, ahead of this year’s schedule getting underway:
This year, there are two teams who again feel the brunt of the unequal scheduling (stop me if you’ve heard these names): Florida and Alabama, arguably the SEC’s flagship brands and standard bearers of their respective divisions. Florida faces three SEC opponents coming off of byes. Alabama faces just two, but that is deceptive.
Alabama faces LSU and Texas A&M off of byes. Moreover, it faces three other teams that may as well have had a bye, and the Tide play two of those on the road: Ole Miss hosts Wofford, Arkansas hosts Alcorn State, Auburn hosts Alabama A&M. Throw in USC, and again Alabama faces half a slate where opponents have faced zero (or qualitatively zero) competition the week before.
The A&M game will be this season’s highest-profile example, but it’s not a new worry for Bama.
The bigger question is ...
Does a bye week actually help a team do better the next week?
In the case of Alabama and A&M, that’s all Tide fans care about. And the answer is, probably, yes. (Though it obviously hasn’t hurt Bama too much during Nick Saban’s championship dynasty.)
For A&M, this will mean a chance to heal up star defensive end Myles Garrett and others and to get in some extra film work.
My colleague Bill Connelly ran numbers on bye weeks last winter, and there’s some evidence that taking 14 days between games (the standard one week-off bye window, like A&M’s before the Oct. 22 Alabama game) really does help, improving a team’s performance against Vegas by 2.3 points. Overall team performance by advanced metrics also seems to incrementally improve.
Of course, when Alabama and Texas A&M actually play, it will be functionally impossible to put an exact point value on how much the Aggies are helped (or hurt) by not having played the weekend before. Coming off a bye wouldn’t cheapen a one-point win, nor should it. But it’ll probably leave Alabama fans salty if the Tide can’t win.
The good news for Alabama? The Tide are pretty good.
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