"They just played four days ago. This defense must be tired."
Conventional wisdom, right? On short turnaround weeks like Sunday-to-Thursday, players must be exhausted. No doubt they're worse than if they had 10 or even 14 days to regroup, patch up their injuries, and take the field feeling as fresh as they did their first year of college.
Sometimes research supports conventional wisdom. Sometimes it demonstrates that the opposite is true. What I'm about to share does both, based on varied criteria when analyzing different categories. Granted, it's only for 2020, because this took a long time to research. But if I can carve out time next summer to look at 2019 and 2018, I would be surprised if the data looked much different.
I analyzed offensive and defensive production for every game last season, recording the length of time between each team's game. The results are pretty remarkable, a sample chart is below, and the rest can be found on the Ff4W Research page: http://www.fantasyfootballforwinners.com/p/long-vs-short-weeks.html.
The long and the short of it (pun intended) is that there is no clear advantage to playing on long rest versus short rest. Defenses struggled most in the "passing yards against" category when playing after four-, seven-, and 13+ day breaks. Offenses enjoyed their most rushing yards per game after 13+ days of rest, but their lowest rushing output after 9-12 days of rest. Teams generally averaged more points on short breaks rather than on longer breaks. And so on.
About halfway through my research, I realized short weeks didn't seem to put teams at a disadvantage. Could it be that playing Sunday-to-Thursday is usually a wash, because that team's opponent usually is playing Sunday-to-Thursday, too. Or late-season Sunday-to-Saturday contests don't matter as much, because both teams are playing on short weeks?
So on a hunch, I went back and added a new category and re-compiled everything I'd done up to that point. That new category is in red in my charts. The reality is, some games feature one team on regular or extended rest, and the other team on short rest (never Sunday-to-Thursday, but often Monday-to-Sunday, for example). That would seem to put the short-rest team at a distinct disadvantage. But while these teams' offensive numbers suffered a bit, their defensive numbers were actually better.
Again, I want to research more years when there's time. Was 2020 an anomaly (for obvious reasons)? Or is this how things are?
As it stands, there's no good reason to predict Player ABC will do better than Player XYZ based on how much time off they've had. And given how frequently people (including me) have assumed the opposite, that's useful information.
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Conventional wisdom, right? On short turnaround weeks like Sunday-to-Thursday, players must be exhausted. No doubt they're worse than if they had 10 or even 14 days to regroup, patch up their injuries, and take the field feeling as fresh as they did their first year of college.
Sometimes research supports conventional wisdom. Sometimes it demonstrates that the opposite is true. What I'm about to share does both, based on varied criteria when analyzing different categories. Granted, it's only for 2020, because this took a long time to research. But if I can carve out time next summer to look at 2019 and 2018, I would be surprised if the data looked much different.
I analyzed offensive and defensive production for every game last season, recording the length of time between each team's game. The results are pretty remarkable, a sample chart is below, and the rest can be found on the Ff4W Research page: http://www.fantasyfootballforwinners.com/p/long-vs-short-weeks.html.
The long and the short of it (pun intended) is that there is no clear advantage to playing on long rest versus short rest. Defenses struggled most in the "passing yards against" category when playing after four-, seven-, and 13+ day breaks. Offenses enjoyed their most rushing yards per game after 13+ days of rest, but their lowest rushing output after 9-12 days of rest. Teams generally averaged more points on short breaks rather than on longer breaks. And so on.
About halfway through my research, I realized short weeks didn't seem to put teams at a disadvantage. Could it be that playing Sunday-to-Thursday is usually a wash, because that team's opponent usually is playing Sunday-to-Thursday, too. Or late-season Sunday-to-Saturday contests don't matter as much, because both teams are playing on short weeks?
So on a hunch, I went back and added a new category and re-compiled everything I'd done up to that point. That new category is in red in my charts. The reality is, some games feature one team on regular or extended rest, and the other team on short rest (never Sunday-to-Thursday, but often Monday-to-Sunday, for example). That would seem to put the short-rest team at a distinct disadvantage. But while these teams' offensive numbers suffered a bit, their defensive numbers were actually better.
Again, I want to research more years when there's time. Was 2020 an anomaly (for obvious reasons)? Or is this how things are?
As it stands, there's no good reason to predict Player ABC will do better than Player XYZ based on how much time off they've had. And given how frequently people (including me) have assumed the opposite, that's useful information.
---
Personalized Fantasy Advice Sign-up: www.fantasyfootballforwinners.com/p/personalized-fantasy-advice.html
Preseason Draft Rankings Sign-up: www.fantasyfootballforwinners.com/p/preseason-rankings.html
