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The Detroit Lions have benefitted the most from net rest days historically
With a schedule template as structured as the NFL’s, one where teams know who their home and away opponents will be in a future season as soon as the regular season concludes, the most important stat to focus on after schedules officially release are net rest days. Essentially, these are the differences of days of rest between games for a team and their opponent going into a matchup, like having to play a team coming off of a bye week.
New analysis shows that the Green Bay Packers have had the worst multi-year rest differential for a franchise since 2019, when the team hired head coach Matt LaFleur. The team’s worst single-season rest differential came in 2022, when the Packers were -13 net days of rest compared to their opponents, the worst mark in the league that year. Despite having a positive rest differential in 2024, it was the team’s only positive rest differential in the last seven years — making Green Bay the only NFL team with that claim since 2019.
Interestingly, the top two teams in rest differential are the Detroit Lions (+48 days of rest) and Dallas Cowboys (+31 days of rest). It’s no coincidence that these two teams are the squads that are most featured in Thanksgiving matchups. Basically, these teams are afforded a couple of extra days of rest compared to their post-Thanksgiving opponents because of that “mini-bye” coming off the Thanksgiving game, usually against opponents who hadn’t played on Thanksgiving themselves.
Including the upcoming 2025 season (+13 net rest days), the Lions will have four seasons of +11 net rest days since 2019. The only other team that has even posted two of those seasons over this timeframe is the Washington Commanders, another team that is frequently featured on Thanksgiving.
Assume that moving forward, the Lions will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the NFL’s schedule layout, due to the league giving them Thanksgiving games. Until that changes, they should receive an edge from the league fairly consistently.
