Rob Hwang: Someones been cutting onions around me all week.
Nick Kranz: I’m going to go ahead and hijack this question as a chance to spread my bye-weeks-don’t-much-matter gospel. To be fair, the data is small-sample and inconclusive. There’s some evidence that it helps a tad, and some evidence that it doesn’t much matter. There’s plenty of noise in the data.
Bye weeks are helpful in terms of granting hurt players an extra week to heal, and so perhaps Cal benefited from getting Valentino Daltoso back healthy into the offensive line rotation.