Hogs Haven
It’s 5 o’clock somewhere…
The 5 o’clock club is published from time to time during the season, and aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.
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Recently, Warren Sharp released his annual analysis of “net rest days”, which analyzes all 32 teams on a week-by-week basis (and cumulatively for the season) to assess which teams are advantaged or disadvantaged by having more or fewer days of rest compared to their opponents.
Sharp gets about 48 hours of attention in mid-May every year by discussing his concerns about this aspect of schedule imbalance at a time when the NFL schedule is the only real topic of conversation among the league’s year-round fans.
This year’s analysis is generally a bit kinder to the NFL than last year’s; in 2024, Sharp declared that the NFL had created the most imbalanced schedule in league history. This year, he sees some overall improvement.
The news is a bit worse for Washington. In 2024, Sharp found that the Commanders were in a 3-way tie for the 9th-worst net rest days at -2.
This year, he finds that Washington has the 3rd-worst situation at a hefty -13.
You can read the entire article by clicking on the linked title below, but I have provided an extended excerpt to give you the flavor of Sharp’s comments about this season’s net rest days.
This year, for example:
Theoretically, these two teams are expected to have an even chance to compete for the Super Bowl this year, but the schedule of opponents they face makes it extremely likely that there will be nothing “even” about their likelihood of winning a Super Bowl.
The path through the 2025 schedule for the Giants is orders of magnitude more difficult.
There aren’t enough games played to distribute all the opponents evenly (think 31 games played each year, one against every other team in the NFL).
More than any other professional league, WHO you play matters more in the NFL, and the schedules are not going to be balanced.
As a result, if we know the opponents each team plays are not going to be balanced, the least the NFL could do is to try and keep the looks that they are trying...
