Why it actually made sense for the Big 12 to give BYU a bye week in week 4

Imagine you're at a restaurant, and you've waited hours for your food. Finally, the appetizers arrive, and they're delicious... and then you have to wait another hour for the main course. That's what it feels like to be a BYU fan right now. We waited a long time for the season to start; it finally did. We played three games, two of which were easy wins as expected, and now, we're back to waiting because we have a bye. This is the second year in a row we've had to deal with this, and it's not ideal for the fans or the players.

But at least last season, BYU had a second bye that was reasonably placed such that they didn't have to go too long without one, and thankfully, starting next season, every team will have two bye weeks every season. This season, however, they're going to have to go nine straight weeks without a bye. Ten if they make it to the Big 12 championship game.

What is this garbage? I thought that by joining a conference, we'd be done with this. Is the Big 12 trying to prevent us from winning the conference or something?

Actually no. There is a very reasonable explanation for this.

It all starts with the fact that there are three Big 12 teams with nonconference games this week. Texas Tech is playing Sam Houston, Houston is playing Georgia Southern, and Arizona is playing Washington St. And then there's Arizona State and Kansas, who are both coming off their game in London and are both understandably getting a bye week so they can recover from their trip and readjust to their time zone. That leaves 11 teams for the Big 12 to schedule games for.

But here's the problem: 11 is an odd number. You can't schedule games for an odd number of teams You have to give one of the teams a bye. There's no way around it other than to make a team play two games in one week, which would obviously be stupid, or to make some weird scheduling policy that ensures that there will always be an even number of available Big 12 teams every week, which would be a total pain and would make it even harder for teams like Texas Tech, Arizona, and Houston who couldn't get a non-conference P4 game this season.

So now, you might be thinking, "OK, so they had to give someone besides Arizona St and Kansas a week 4 bye, but why did it have to be BYU?" Well, it had to be someone. Why not BYU? You could argue that since BYU's a major title contender, they deserve special treatment. But that argument reminds me of 2023 when Oklahoma was arguing that they shouldn't have to play in Provo in November. Either they wanted the Big 12 to give BYU nothing but road games in November, or they thought it should be someone else going to Provo because they were Oklahoma and they deserved special treatment. Let's not be that way.

Plus, there's actually a good reason for the Big 12 to have chosen BYU to get the bye in week 4: to help them beat Notre Dame. If I were the Big 12, I would want to do whatever I could to help BYU beat Notre Dame because that would be a big win for the Big 12 as a whole. Before the schedule was released, I was predicting that the Big 12 would give BYU a bye the week the week before the Notre Dame game so they would have extra time to prepare for it. But I've since realized that there's a problem with that idea: BYU doesn't usually play very well the week after bye weeks.

To prove this point, I'm going to go through all of BYU's games in the Kalani Sitake Era that were the week after a bye week, and I'm going to give each one a rank. 1 means they either lost by more than expected or lost when they were expected to win, 2 means they lost by about as much as expected, 3 means they lost by less than expected, 4 means they won by less than expected, 5 means they won by about as much as expected, and 6 means they either won by more than expected or won when they were expected to lose.

Look at all those 1's. You see why the Big 12 didn't want to give BYU a bye the week before Notre Dame? At the same time, I can also see why they wouldn't want to give BYU their bye after the Notre Dame game because if they did that, the Notre Dame game would be BYU's seventh straight game without a bye. They wanted BYU to be well rested, but not sluggish, so that's why they decided to give BYU their bye a few weeks before Notre Dame.

Now, let's see if that was a good idea. We'll do the same thing we just did, but this time, we'll look at the games that were three weeks after a bye week. Keep in mind there will be fewer games on this list because there have been several times where BYU has had two or fewer consecutive games after a bye week.

No 1's this time. The average ranking for this group of games was 4.3, which is better than the 3.5 average for the first group. For you stats nerds out there, I did a two-sample t-test, and technically, the difference between the two means was not statistically significant, meaning we don't have sufficient evidence to conclude that BYU plays better three weeks after the bye week than they do one week after the bye week. However, it does still feel like BYU has a better chance against Notre Dame if the bye week is three weeks before instead of one week before.

There is also another thing the Big 12 did to help BYU out against Notre Dame: they gave them a Friday home game the week before. This means BYU will have eight days to prepare. Let's see how BYU does in Saturday games the week after weekday home games in the Kalani Sitake Era.

The average rank for this set was 4.8. That is really good. I did another two-sample t-test between this set and the set of games that were the week after bye weeks, and the p-value I got was 0.079, which is not statistically significant if we use the standard alpha of 0.05.

However, you could argue that if the Big 12 was trying to determine whether or not to give BYU a Friday home game before the Notre Dame game, you would rather have a type 1 error (deciding it would make a difference when it wouldn't) than a type 2 error (deciding it wouldn't make a difference when it would.) So that means we should use 0.10 as our alpha, which means the difference is statistically significant. (If you didn't follow any of that, don't worry. Neither did 99% of the human race.)

All this being said, am I super happy that BYU has a bye week this early in the season? Not really. I'd still rather have a shot at playing for the Big 12 title without having it be our tenth consecutive week with a game. But while whether or not it's in the Big 12's best interest for BYU to win the Big 12 title game is debatable, whether or not it's in their best interest for BYU to beat Notre Dame is not debatable. So if someone had to have a bye in week 4, I don't blame the Big 12 for having it be BYU. And bonus points for the Friday home game the week before the Notre Dame game.

On the other hand, there is no reasonable explanation for not putting the Holy War during rivalry week so that it wouldn't interfere with too many other big games, only to put it the same week as Texas-Missouri, Georgia-Ole Miss, Oregon-Ohio St, Alabama-LSU, and Miami-Notre Dame, meaning it will probably be at 8:15 again just like the last time it was in early November. What are we doing Big 12?

As I always say at the end of every article, remember to be kind to the officials.

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