2025 Rest Advantage

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

I wrote about the schedule last week, and discussed strength of schedule and early odds for the games. Something else 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.

I created a graphic to show what the rest advantage is for every Chiefs game this year. The Chiefs only have games on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays this year, which is very different from last year, where they also had games on Wednesday and Saturday. Overall, this should make the rest advantage fairly standard, unless we happen to play multiple teams off of byes.