The Factors: Are Thursday games really that bad?

I didn’t have high hopes for yesterday’s Thursday night matchup of the Rams and the 49ers, and so I thought it would be a good time to study the impact of rest on player performance.  But, wow, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Jared Goff made excellent decisions and showcased his arm talent, and the then-touchdown-less 49ers were a missed extra point away from joining the Rams with 40-plus points.

Still, last night’s excitement felt very much like the exception rather than the rule.  My memory suggests that, by and large, Thursday games have had less offense than games on full rest.  And it turns out that my suspicion about the lesser quality of Thursday night games is true, and it shows up in fantasy scoring.

I ran a series of weighted average comparisons of team performance on unusual rest versus standard rest, the latter which is six days, most often between two Sundays.  Typically, teams have three days of rest when they play on Sunday and then Thursday, have three days of rest when they play on Monday and then Sunday, have 7 days of rest when they play on Sunday and then Monday, and have nine-plus days of rest when they play on Thursday and then Sunday or Monday or they have a bye week.  I ran those weighted averages based on per-attempt stats and then multiplied them by a fixed total of 35 passing attempts and 27 rushing attempts, which is the average number of passes and runs in a game.

When teams have just three off days between games, their passing offense noticeably suffers.

When teams are forced to play those Thursday games, you can expect their quarterbacks to lose about 6 passing yards and a fifth of a touchdown compared to their normal outputs.  That sums to a loss of nearly a full standard fantasy point, which is in the range of 5-10 percent of the expected point total of most fantasy-relevant quarterbacks for a given week.

I did not expect either five or seven days of rest to mean much for teams, and relative to the bigger extremes, it doesn’t.  However, it is interesting to note that, in both cases, fantasy point scoring went up a bit.  My theory on that is that the NFL aims to put better teams in the featured Monday night game, which means that the samples of both the five and seven days of rest are skewed more heavily toward good teams than the sample of teams on standard rest.

When quarterbacks have nine-plus days to rest, they see the biggest improvement in their fantasy production with both their touchdown and interception rates improving.  However, that benefit is just half that of their backfield.  And, in fact, running backs show a much clearer pattern of improvement as they have more time to rest between games, specifically in their yardage totals.

When they are limited to three days off, backs lose a couple of yards off their normal lines.  Then, for each additional couple of rest days, they increase that total by 2-3 yards, culminating in an extra 5.1 extra yards when they have nine or more days off.

There could again be some team bias influencing the universal small gain in touchdowns, and perhaps the lower-scoring nature of Thursday games encourages a greater ratio of runs versus passes, creating extra rushing touchdowns.  Either way, it’s tougher to make fantasy decisions based on the changes running backs see on unusual rest than it is for quarterbacks.  But this research does show that some pessimism is warranted for quarterbacks who play on Thursday.  It won’t be enough to bench Aaron Rodgers when he takes on the Bears next Thursday, but it might impact your start-or-sit decisions for the likes of Carson Wentz, Cam Newton, Alex Smith, and Jay Cutler at various points in October.