NFL team performance when resting starters
After reading through this morning’s VSiN Newsletter, I was captivated by Bill Adee’s comments about 18 teams having “meaningless” games this weekend to wrap up the NFL regular season. That’s more than half of the league. As it turns out, the grouping includes all of the teams that are eliminated from playoff contention.
That said, those teams typically don’t treat the games as worthless, as they typically play their regular starters for the duration. The games that grab my attention, and one of VSiN’s savvy readers who remembered that I have some critical information on such contests, are the games in which teams have locked up a playoff spot or seed position and are choosing to rest their starters to ensure their health for the postseason.
For good reason, most fans and analysts of the NFL choose to focus on the playoff impactful contests in the season’s final weeks, but every year, there are inevitably games on the schedule in which one of the teams has already clinched its playoff position and has declared it will be planning to rest its starters. These so-called “meaningless” games lose much of their luster accordingly, making it seemingly impossible to handicap the contests.
Unfortunately, while not “meaningless,” recent bowl seasons have acclimated us to the process of trying to handicap games in which teams don’t have their full allotment of players. The degree of tanking varies too. Some teams sit their studs out completely, while others think along the lines of at least keeping the players in sync by having them play a quarter or two.