2024 Detroit Lions Schedule Repeats Frustrating Trends of the Past Decade

When the Detroit Lions announced their schedule for the 2024 NFL season, there was something that immediately caught my attention.

For the past 10 seasons, bye weeks have typically ranged from Week 4 to Week 14. Starting in 2019, the first scheduled bye week was Week 5 (the NFL will not expand to an 18-week schedule until the 2021 season).

The Lions have the (possibly) unfortunate luck of having their first bye week in Week 5. Detroit is used to early bye weeks. In his 10 years of football history, the Lions have had Week 5 byes three times and Week 6 byes twice. In fact, the Lions haven’t had a bye week beyond Week 10 since 2016.

Seeing this got me thinking. Are the Lions really going to have a bye week soon? That’s what it seemed like at a quick glance. For comparison, the Green Bay Packers have had bye weeks in Week 14 (2022), Week 13 (2021), and Week 11 (2019), which is much slower than Detroit in recent years.

Do the numbers confirm my hunch? Let’s look at each team’s bye week since 2015 using some boxplots.

That’s a lot of plots and a lot of data. However, the value we’re really interested in here is the average value, represented by the “X” in the box. This represents a team’s average bye week since 2015. Let’s summarize them in a more understandable format by ranking them from earliest to most recent average byes.

In fact, the numbers confirm my hunch. The Detroit Lions average his earliest bye week in the entire NFL. The average number of weeks missed since 2015 is 7.1, which is the first half of a season. The next closest team, the Dallas Cowboys, averages almost half a week behind. In contrast, the Indianapolis Colts average bye week is 10.6 weeks, more than three full weeks slower than Detroit.

Will the Lions get screwed over by the NFL again? Maybe you should control your anger a little.

It doesn’t seem like unpopular teams get byes early on or popular teams get byes late in the season. The Arizona Cardinals have averaged the second-slowest bye week, but no one sees them as a national selling point. The Pittsburgh Steelers, on the other hand, have one of the largest fan bases, but their bye week averages just 8.1 fans, the fourth-fastest fan base in the NFL over the past decade.

An early bye week is far from optimal, especially during a 17-game schedule, but the NFL probably has a reason for that. What do the Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions have in common? Both teams are staples of Thanksgiving games. Since 2006, the NFL has held three games on Thanksgiving, but the only annual game is between the Cowboys and Lions. Thanksgiving usually falls around Week 12 of his NFL season. As a result, the league could lean towards an earlier bye week for these two teams.

This is the most likely explanation, but it’s not one I’m satisfied with. Other than an earlier start time, the Thanksgiving Day game is essentially “Thursday Night Football,” a weekly game schedule that is notorious for its short week and poor quality of football. Looking at the 2024 schedule, the Minnesota Vikings will play Thursday Night Football in Week 8, but have a bye week in Week 6. If the Vikings can get a bye so close to Thursday’s game, why can’t the Lions get a bye? Will there be a bye in Week 10? Instead, it would make sense to give them a bye right before Thursday’s game to make up for the short week.

Getting an early bye isn’t the end of the world, but in a high-intensity sport like soccer, it’s inevitable that injuries will mount during the season. The Lions are more likely to be out of shape by Week 12 than Week 5, so an extra week of recuperation may have less of an impact. The league is not giving the Lions any benefits.