Philadelphia Eagles

How the NFL's early bye week will destroy the Philadelphia Eagles' momentum

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:08 p.m. ET

Chris Chase

The first Sunday of the NFL season was just 15 days ago and already the league is at one of its dreaded midseason mile-markers. The bye weeks start this weekend, with Philadelphia and Green Bay getting the (dis)honor of skipping a game before they're even a quarter of a way into their seasons.

It's rough for both franchises, but especially for Philadelphia, the surprise team of 2016 that's out to a 3-0 start with a momentum that could only be stopped by the schedule-maker's forced vacation. It's too early for that. Philadelphia, in the midst of its hottest streak since the days of Donovan McNabb, one day after surprising the league and destroying the Pittsburgh Steelers, now won't play until Oct. 9. There will be teams that have played five games while Philly (and Green Bay) will have played three. It's unfair. The NFL's byes start too soon and end too late.

The entire point of the bye week, of course, is to give the league 17 NFL Sundays instead of 16. And that's great, everybody gets to make a little more money and, though it's never any fun when your team has a bye week or your fantasy team is decimated for all of November because of them, no fan is truly complaining about a free week of football. There's also the bonus that, in the middle of a brutal 16-game slate, teams get a one-week vacation from the rigors of NFL football and having to sit for soft-lit discussions for pregame shows. But is it a break when you've barely broken a sweat (like Green Bay and Philly) or when the season is almost over (like when Cleveland and Tennessee have theirs in Week 13 -- luckily neither will be playing for anything but draft slots)?

Here are the bye weeks for all 32 NFL teams:

1. The breadth of the bye weeks needs to be shortened.

The first bye Sunday is Oct. 2. The last one is Dec. 4. That's two months of byes! It stretches over 10 weeks! Luck of the draw is always going to exist when it comes to schedule-making, but giving two teams a bye on the first weekend of October and two other teams byes the week after Thanksgiving is simply unnecessary.

There are hundreds of factors to consider beyond the nearly impossible task of coming up with a 17-week schedule for 32 teams: Division teams have 14 common opponents. A team needs a bye coming off a London game. Every team has to play Thursday. Teams can't have home or road trips lasting longer than two games (with very few exceptions). Teams aren't supposed to play too many games against opponents coming off byes. There are TV considerations, short weeks, end-of-year division games and a desire not to put the Bears in primetime in back-to-back weeks -- twice. (Oops.) Nobody said this was easy. But the NFL boasts it has 136 computers on the job which is kind of mind-boggling given that NASA got to the moon with worse technology than you had in your first flip phone and the NFL basically admits it needs the Large Hadron Collider to set a Ravens-Texans 1 p.m. game.

2. Here's how to do it.

This season, four weekends feature just two teams on a bye. That means four weeks = 8 bye teams.

Two weekends feature six teams on a bye. That means two weeks = 12 bye teams.

Confused yet? Here are the amount of teams on a bye from Week 4 until the first Sunday in December: 2, 4, 2, 2, 6, 6, 4, 4, 0, 2.

That looks like some sort of mathematic sequence named after a 17th-century Italian guy that you totally forgot about the minute after you learned it junior year. There's no pattern, no appearance of thought.

Okay, so what do you do? Have four weeks with six bye teams and two weeks with four bye teams. Start in Week 6 and end in Week 11. If you don't like that (too many 12-game weekly slates), then do eight weeks of four teams. Are these perfect solutions? No. Are they both mathematically and architecturally feasible? Don't ask me; the NFL has the 136 computers. But are they better than what we have right now? Certainly.

This won't happen, of course. It's too reasonable. Nobody will get up in arms about this, not when there are dozens of other things to get football fans up in arms. When two teams are on a bye you hardly miss them, which is probably why most weeks just cut out that one game. When six teams are on a bye the NFL Sunday feels empty and hollow, which is what I imagine it's like to be a Jags fan.

Do something. Do anything. The bye weeks aren't written in stone -- or at least they haven't been. Except for those years when there were only 31 teams in the league, necessitating that at least one team have a bye every week, there have been seasons when the byes started in Week 3. Other years started in Week 5. Almost every year last decade had the byes end in Week 10 but now it's steadily creeping longer, to Week 11 (2011-12, 2015) to Week 12 (2013-14) and now to Week 13.

3. Why? And why do no teams have a bye in Week 12 this year?

No teams have a bye in Week 12 presumably because of Thanksgiving. The NFL has never had bye weeks on Thanksgiving, something that was usually a moot point because the bye weeks had ended by them. (The fluctuations in Weeks 11 and 12 serving as the final bye weekend were due to which was the final NFL week before Thanksgiving.) This year, however, the NFL just skipped over Turkey Day and gave Cleveland and Tennessee (again, no great loss) the first December byes in recent history.

Why doesn't the NFL want to have Thanksgiving byes? Apparently -- and this was a surprise to me -- the ratings are generally higher on Thanksgiving Sunday compared to similar the weeks before or after. I never would have thought that, but numbers and money don't lie.

That's small comfort to the Eagles and Packers, who will have the distinct honor of playing 13 straight regular-season weeks after their early bye.