2024 Rest Advantage

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

The 2024 NFL schedule has come out! We’ve known for a long time the different teams we would face this year, so there are no surprises. If you’re anything like me, I can’t really visualize it until the actual schedule comes out and we can see it week by week. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that we are not playing a game in Germany, as many thought.

Something that comes up immediately after the schedules all come out is the idea of “rest advantage”. Rest advantage is when one team has more days rest than the other team when they play. Perhaps Team A played on Sunday, while Team B played on Monday, and now they are playing each other on Sunday. This means that Team A has one more day of rest than Team B, and thus has a theoretical advantage over Team B, who had to play on Monday.

The Chiefs have a weird schedule this year. We have Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday night games (one each). That sort of odd distribution of days can lead to a very skewed advantage or disadvantage, so I created a graphic that shows the number of our rest days compared to our opponents for each team we face this year. This allows us to easily see the games we have an advantage, disadvantage, or even.