Will the Bye Week Help or Hurt Illinois Football?

There may be an argument for each side, but under the circumstances, the answer should be simple

Aug 29, 2024; Champaign, Illinois, USA; Illinois Fighting Illini head coach Bret Bielema greets running back Ca'Lil Valentine (5) before the first half at Memorial Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Ron Johnson-Imagn Images / Ron Johnson-Imagn Images

Think about your own job. You go to work five days a week, every week, for months on end. You get weekends off, sure, but that's usually just enough time to handle paperwork and a few chores before catching up on a little sleep – just so you can go back to work and do it all over again next week.

Now imagine that your job requires peak physical performance, clockwork-precision coordination with your co-workers and subjecting your body to nearly 70 small car crashes over the course of your big two-hour weekly "presentation." You, like all of us normie folk, would instantly be looking for the nearest unemployment line.

That's why football players are different. The grind of the season is incomprehensible to a person who has never experienced it. And even for coaches and staff – who work astonishingly long and strange hours, under constant pressure to produce results that are binary, public and highly scrutinized – the gig is a meat grinder.

Everybody needs a vacation, or even just a break – and nobody more than these guys. Yet there's a weird – but fair – question that comes up from time to time within the context of a football season:

Do bye weeks help?

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For Illinois (6-3, 4-2 Big Ten) coming off its second bye of the season and set to host Michigan State (4-5, 2-4 Big Ten) at Champaign's Memorial Stadium on Saturday (1:30 p.m. CT, on FS1), the question has rarely been more urgent. And the answer, frankly, comes down to how full or empty you consider the Illini's glass to be.

A few years ago, The Athletic published a very thoughtful (and admittedly NFL-centric) article on the subject of football bye weeks by a sports scientist who had worked with the San Francisco 49ers, as well as Major League Soccer and the Women's World Cup. It's worth a look, even if its conclusions wind up leaving you no more convinced about the value or perils of bye weeks than you were before reading it.

The argument, essentially, is this: Competitive athletes – and especially those who are routinely subjected to traumatic physical forces – need time to heal and rest both body and mind, and a bye week offers time for recuperation as well as additional preparation and fresh perspective and thought. In the moment, are these benefits more important to a team than forging ahead, maintaining a rhythm and consistency of process (which football players are accustomed to and often grow to crave) and, in so many words, keeping a collective eye on the ball?

In this case, the answer seems clear: The Illini needed that bye. They are coming off back-to-back losses, including a far-less-dismissible defeat in their most recent outing. Arguably their two best players on each side of the ball – receiver Pat Bryant and defensive back Xavier Scott – have been banged up, along with a host of others. Illinois' game plans have appeared shoddy and rudderless when compared to those through their 6-1 start. These guys needed a break in the worst way.

A couple more thoughts, just to muddy the waters: Michigan State is also coming off a bye? Do those factors cancel one another out? Also, there's this: The Illini are 5-1 coming off a bye under coach Bret Bielema, which – again, depending on your outlook – could be a random blip in the matrix or suggest that he and his staff are that much better at their jobs when given more time to prepare.

Then again, aren't we all? And let's say Illinois takes care of business against MSU? Will we be able to say with certainty that its win had anything to do with the week off? If so, how much? The bye-week debate is basically a football Rorschach test – an amorphous, bias-confirming, hyper-contextualized blob of vagueness that is black-and-white only in the strictest sense of the phrase. There's too much going on here, and the lack of data (and even an understanding of exactly what to track) leaves us grasping at thin air.

So when all else fails, keep it simple, Bubba: The Illini were nicked up and likely in its own head after a couple of poor showings. They got a chance to become a little less so on both fronts last week.

Sounds good to us.

Follow Jason at @jasonlangendorf.bsky.social.

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