With last week’s release of the 2025 NFL schedule, one of the things people love to report on is the rest differential each team is given. This is based on the number of days between games for a team and their opponent.
For example, if a team plays a Sunday game after a Monday night game, their rest difference is 6 days. If their opponent was coming off a bye week and hasn’t played for 14 days (2 Sundays ago), then the rest differential for this game is -8 for the non-bye team and +8 for the bye team.
An 8-day rest differential is really as extreme as it gets as 64.2% of the games in the NFL since 2021 have been played on equal rest between teams. It’s also very rare as an 8-day difference has happened 8 times since 2021, or the equivalent of twice a season.
But people really do love pointing this stuff out as a way to make the case some teams are getting preferential treatment with the schedule, and some are getting the shaft by playing too many teams with more rest.
Is any of this information truly actionable for betting on the NFL, or is it just sour grapes by fans in the offseason? Let’s crunch some numbers on the concept of rest differential in the NFL over the last 4 post-COVID years with the 17-game schedule. We’re only going to consider the regular season here.
Anything Stand Out with the Outliers?
With data like this, you’re going to be most interested in the outliers, the extreme cases at each end of the list. You can split hairs between a couple days of rest, but if one team is +20 and another is -20, does that show any trends worth keeping an eye on?
San Francisco fans seem most interested in rest differential for obvious reasons. The 2023 49ers had a -20 rest differential as they played several teams that were coming off a bye week. The 2024 49ers then had a -22 rest differential, which was the worst of any team since at least 2019. For what it’s worth, the 49ers are +9 days of rest in 2025, so the schedule makers gave them a break this time.
However, what exactly did this prove when the 49ers reached the Super Bowl in 2023 and then finished 6-11 in 2024? Clearly, it wasn’t the poor rest differential that led to those wildly varying results. It was the catastrophic injuries and blown leads in 2024 that did that team in.
On the other end of the spectrum, the 2024 Ravens had a +16 rest differential, the most favorable of any team in recent years. The only other team better than +12 was the 2022 Bills (+13). Both of those teams were very good, but on the other hand, the Ravens and Bills have two of the best scoring differentials for a 6-year span in NFL history as both have been so good since 2019.
2025’s Rest Winners and Losers
In 2025, it looks like the Las Vegas Raiders drew the short end of the stick with a -19 rest differential, followed by the Saints (-14) and Commanders (-13). But you might be surprised to learn that the Raiders are 14-4 ATS (77.8%) with a rest disadvantage since 2021, the 2nd-best record in the league over that time. So, maybe the Raiders will be a good spread pick this year under new coach Pete Carroll and new quarterback Geno Smith.
As for the best rest differentials in 2025, the Lions (+13), Dolphins (+11), and Rams (+11) are the top 3 teams. This is actually the 3rd time since 2021 that Detroit is +11 or better as getting a mini-bye week after playing on Thanksgiving seems to help boost their number. But by the same token, having to play the earliest game of the NFL week (12:30 PM EST on a Thursday afternoon) is not a good thing in theory.
For what it’s worth, here are the most extreme teams in rest differential and how they fared in straight-up record (SU), spread record (ATS), and hitting their over/under preseason win total since 2021:
- 17 teams with rest differential of +9 or higher: 149-138-1 SU (51.9%), 149-131-8 ATS (53.1%), 8 under/9 over
- 16 teams with rest differential of -9 or lower: 128-143-1 SU (47.2%), 126-138-8 ATS (47.8%), 5 over/11 under
Potential Trends
This is small sample stuff, but it’s also the 1st interesting data point that there may be something worth examining here for the future. Only 5-of-16 teams with the worst rest differential were able to hit their preseason over in win total, and it’s not like we’re dealing with a lot of bad teams. That list includes the 2022 Packers (back-to-back No. 1 seeds in 2020-21), the 2023 Chiefs going for a repeat, and the aforementioned 49ers in 2023-24.
Having the biggest rest advantages still leads to a record barely above .500, with nothing remarkable about meeting their preseason expectations. But maybe there is something to having a really negative differential.
More Rest Data to Ponder
Intuitively, we know why we think rest matters so much in the NFL. We’ve seen some really good coaches, including Andy Reid, excel after a bye week where his team gets to rest and prepare for an extra week. We hear about rest in the playoffs and the advantage of having that No. 1 seed, or when teams rest starters in Week 18 for the playoffs.
We think a team on a “short week” when they have to play a Sunday game after playing into the wee hours of Monday night is at a real disadvantage.
But is an extra day really that advantageous in the NFL? Is rest ever going to be more important than how good your opponent is or where you’re playing them? Also, don’t we generally think highly of Andy Reid-coached teams because they win often in all situations? The same goes for No. 1 seeds who are expected to win at home in the playoffs after a great regular season.
If you look at the teams with the best SU records after a bye week since 2021, it’s almost exactly who you would expect:
- Ravens (5-0)
- Eagles (5-0)
- Bills (5-0)
- Steelers (4-0)
- Chiefs (5-1)
- Bengals (4-1)
- 49ers (4-1)
All generally successful teams and plenty of Super Bowl contenders.
Then if you look at the teams with the worst records after a bye since 2021, it’s the usual suspects down there too:
- Cardinals (1-3)
- Jaguars (1-3)
- Bears (1-3)
- Buccaneers (1-3)
- Raiders (1-3)
- Seahawks (1-3)
- Jets (1-3)
- Patriots (1-3)
All generally bad teams except for Tampa Bay. A bye week is a great chance to rest up after a tough season that grinds teams down, but it’s not a magic potion to secure a win. You still have to be good, and other’s data going back further to 2011 shows that the bye week advantage has greatly shrunk in the new CBA ever since they stopped allowing teams padded practices during that bye.
The Rest Advantage Numbers
Let’s put some more data to this. Since 2021, here are the records (SU and ATS) for all games where a team had a rest advantage:
- 1-day rest advantage: 59-84 SU (41.3%), 58-82-3 ATS (41.6%)
- 2-day rest advantage: 7-7 SU (50%), 5-9 ATS (35.7%)
- 3-day rest advantage: 62-58-1 SU (51.7%), 68-50-3 ATS (57.4%)
- 4-day rest advantage: 14-7 SU (66.7%), 14-7 ATS (66.7%)
- 6-day rest advantage: 5-4 SU (55.6%), 5-4 ATS (55.6%)
- 7-day rest advantage: 43-31 SU (58.1%), 30-42-2 ATS (41.9%)
- 8-day rest advantage: 3-4-1 SU (43.8%), 3-5 ATS (37.5%)
- Any rest advantage: 193-195-2 SU (49.7%), 183-199-8 ATS (47.9%)
The last row is the real kicker here, as the team with any type of rest advantage is just 193-195-2 SU since 2021. That’s almost as .500 as it gets. The inverse of these numbers is true for the rest disadvantage, so for teams on the short end with that extreme 8-day rest differential, they’re still 4-3-1 in those games. No big deal.
Then when you look at the rest by days, teams with an extra day are winning just 41.3% of the time. Maybe it doesn’t hurt to be a day short after all.
One of the only numbers here that actually looks impressive is the 4-day rest where those teams are 14-7. Then while the 7-day rest advantage is a solid 58.1% winning rate, notice how those teams are not good at covering the spread (41.9%) at all. That’s interesting.
But the main takeaway here is that rest isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in the NFL. If you look at the teams with the best spread records since 2021 in games with a rest advantage, you find the Lions (12-4), Steelers (10-4), and Cowboys (11-5) on top.
Likewise, if you looked at all NFL games since 2021, you’d find the Lions, Cowboys, and Steelers all in the top 4 for best spread teams, so they’re pretty good at covering regardless of the rest. The same can be said for the bottom of the league being consistently bad no matter how many days they got to rest.
Conclusion: No Need to Get Restless Over This Metric
Obviously, we’ll need more years of data to study this thoroughly. The future of the NFL seems to include more international games (more travel miles) and possibly an 18-game schedule. But for the start of the 17-game schedule era, it just doesn’t look like rest differential is something to get worried about.
Games are still going to be primarily determined by things like who plays better that day, who gets the calls from the refs, the lucky bounces, and things of that nature. Rest is far down the list of reasons why a team should have won or lost a game.
For now, rest differential just looks like a metric that fans can cling to when complaining about the “fairness” of their team’s schedule. However, I might put in a bet on the Raiders under 7.5 wins in 2025 just to be safe.
