VikesCentric: Goodbye to post-bye week losses

One thing that used to bug me about former Vikings head coach Denny Green was his fascination with the team's record going in and out of a bye week. For me, there was too much emphasis on the games surrounding a bye. They were just games on the schedule, after all—what's the big deal? But in today's NFL, perhaps he was right—about the post-bye week game, anyway.

Going into the bye, a team wants a win so they don't fixate on a loss and let it fester for two weeks. But you really don't want to lose any game during any week of a season, and most pro football players know how to let a loss go—especially when they get time off. So a good pre-bye week record is a rather dubious mark, in my opinion—sorry Denny.

But post-bye week success is another matter, especially if you are a Minnesota Viking. In the past, Vikings players have come back from the bye with all kinds of issues that they created for themselves during their time off--from DUI's to the infamous Love Boat excursion. But we aren't going to go into all those bad memories.

The good news is that no Vikings player (that we know of) was arrested last week, and the only lingering distraction is the protracted reinstatement proceedings for Adrian Peterson. And that is not going to get resolved until next week, at the earliest, so it is no longer a bye-week distraction.

Regardless, the question remains: should we expect the Vikings to have trouble with this game coming out of the bye week? People can talk about a team's post-bye-week record all they want (and they do), but each team is different. The Vikings have lost their four previous bye-week games, so that may not be a good sign, but I would say this year's team is different enough to mitigate the relevancy.

At the very least, the coaching staff has changed, and since Denny Green took pride in having his team ready for the post-bye games, perhaps coaching has something to do with it. Mike Zimmer will be leading his team out of the bye as a head coach for the first time on Sunday, but we learned in the Star Tribune on Tuesday that he is 3-2-1 coming out of the bye as the defensive coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals. So what is Zim's attitude on the game?

"Sometimes it's who you play. Sometimes it's the quarterback," Zimmer told the Star Tribune. "I know it's a stat that a lot of people like to use coming out of byes, this and that. Usually, the good football teams win more than the others. That would be my guess."

But, to give Denny the benefit of the doubt, maybe the modern day NFL player really likes his down time on a bye week to get away from football--as far as they can--and perhaps they are harder to get back on task once the break is over. Are there any signs of that in the league this season? Let's take a look.

To this point in the season, (week 10 completed) there have been 26 of the 32 byes taken. That means 20 of the post-bye week games have been played--six teams (including the Vikings) had their bye last week and play their post-bye week game this weekend. And of those 20 post-bye week games, a team coming off the bye only won seven of them or .350 percent. (It should be pointed out that in two of those games, both of the teams were coming off byes—Broncos vs. Cardinals and Packers vs. Bears. Throw those games out and it is five bye-team wins out of 16 games for .312 percent.)

This season sample, then, shows that it is harder to win coming off a bye week than not-–by about a margin of 2-to-1. There is a case to be made that some rust grows on bye-week teams since the margin of victory (or loss, as the case may be) in nine of the 20 games was double-digits, and six of them were margins of 16 points or more.

(Is there an advantage to playing at home after the bye week? In nine of the 20 games in which the bye-week team played at home, they won three times and lost six. For the 11 teams playing on the road after a bye, there were only four wins and seven losses, which seems to make sense. But it is really hard to draw any definitive conclusions from this small a sample size.)

Ultimately, a coach wants his team rested, ready and real healthy after a bye-week, and injury-wise the Vikings are doing quite well, with the possibility of tight end Kyle Rudolph (one of only two players on the injury report) rejoining the team for Sunday's game. Certainly the team is rested, after a week out of their football gear. And as to being ready, Zimmer checked on that when the team returned to practice on Monday.

It may be important to go back to Zimmer's earlier point as to who you are playing after the bye week. The Vikings are getting the Chicago Bears, who are a week removed from their bye, but are a team heading in the wrong direction. The Bears, losers in five of their last six games, have given up more than 50 points in each of its past two contests—becoming only the second team in NFL history to do so in consecutive games.

The Vikings teams of the recent past (those same teams that had trouble out of the bye) have trouble winning in Chicago, but the current team is on a two-game winning streak for the first time this season, and they have to hope the bye week hasn't stalled their momentum. Zimmer told his players that he is counting on that not being the case.

"He told us that good teams come back, and they don't miss a beat," safety Harrison Smith told the Star Tribune. "They pick up where they left off and keep improving. Him reminding us of that, guys were ready to go and get this thing rolling."

If they do that, the Vikings can give Zimmer a 1.000 winning percentage as a head coming out of the bye. How about that, Denny?

Head over to VikingsJournal.com and check out A.J. Mansour's article on the struggling Chicago Bears and then join in the conversation on the Vikings Journal forums, where everything Purple is dissected and discussed.