A quarter of all regular-season weeks are played with at least one starter whose NFL team is idle, and it costs 15.58 points. That much is structural. What is not structural is who pays it: exposure runs from West Waco’s 0.084 idle starters a week to Oeiras’ 0.494, a 5.9× spread worth something like seventy points of scoring a season between the ends. This turned up as a control in a playoff study and is too big to leave in a footnote.
A player whose NFL team is on bye scores nothing. If you start him, that slot is dead. Across six seasons and 1,328 franchise-weeks the cost is steep and it is not linear — the second dead slot hurts far more than the first.
| Idle starters | Franchise-weeks | Mean points for | vs a clean week |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1,000 | 180.29 | — |
| 1 | 268 | 171.24 | −9.05 |
| 2 | 48 | 145.25 | −35.04 |
| 3 or more | 12 | 97.00 | −83.29 |
Weighted across every affected week the average is 164.71 against 180.29 — a 15.58-point tax on 24.7% of all weeks played.
This is the part that is not luck. Bye weeks are published in April. Which of your players share one, and whether you carry enough bodies to cover the overlap, is a roster-construction decision made months ahead of the week it bites.
| Franchise | Idle starters / week | Weeks affected | Est. PF lost / season | Six-season wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oeiras Silver Swans | 0.494 | 36.1% | 77.9 | 48 |
| Chicago Maesters of the Midway | 0.482 | 41.0% | 88.3 | 35 |
| South Philly Pigeon Boys | 0.470 | 31.3% | 67.5 | 31 |
| Kawasaki Samurai | 0.422 | 28.9% | 62.3 | 24 |
| South Park Cows | 0.422 | 33.7% | 72.7 | 45 |
| San Antonio Stetsons | 0.398 | 34.9% | 75.3 | 45 |
| Las Vegas Gamblers | 0.373 | 31.3% | 67.5 | 19 |
| Carbon County Coal Crushers | 0.349 | 28.9% | 62.3 | 38 |
| Houston Longhorns | 0.301 | 25.3% | 54.5 | 46 |
| Washington Redskin Potatoes | 0.241 | 18.1% | 38.9 | 43 |
| San Diego Hopheads | 0.205 | 19.3% | 41.5 | 34 |
| Hollywood Wookies | 0.205 | 14.5% | 31.2 | 35 |
| Scranton Stranglers | 0.181 | 15.7% | 33.7 | 67 |
| Enniscorthy Electric Eels | 0.169 | 16.9% | 36.3 | 42 |
| Willamette Valley Coopers | 0.108 | 10.8% | 23.4 | 50 |
| West Waco Wildcatters | 0.084 | 8.4% | 18.2 | 62 |
The two most successful franchises in the league sit thirteenth and sixteenth on this list. Scranton pay the tax in 15.7% of weeks, West Waco in 8.4%. Chicago pay it in 41.0% — nearly five times as often as West Waco, for an estimated seventy-point annual difference in points scored. The rank correlation between exposure and six-season wins is −0.398.
The correlation is not the interesting part, and it is not clean. A good team has good players, good players are worth roster spots, and a deep roster covers a bye without a dead slot — so causation plausibly runs from “good” to “covered” rather than the other way. Oeiras are the counterexample that keeps it honest: worst exposure in the league and a 48–35 record, better than eleven franchises who manage byes better than they do.
“Est. PF lost per season” is an estimate and should be read as an order of magnitude, not a ledger. It multiplies a franchise’s affected-week rate by the league-wide 15.58 average and by 13.83 weeks. It assumes each franchise’s affected weeks cost the league-average amount, which will be wrong for anyone whose dead slots cluster at high-scoring positions.
Player-to-NFL-team mapping is per season, not per week. A player traded mid-season is attributed to whichever team players_by_year records for him, so a handful of mid-season movers will be misclassified in both directions. At 0.306 idle starters per franchise-week league-wide the effect is small, but it is not zero and it is not corrected.
Because unlike almost everything else measured on this shelf, it is free. The lineup-judgment study found no evidence that managers in this league differ in their ability to pick between two playable men. This is not that. This is a scheduling problem with a published answer eight months in advance, and the gap between the best and worst at solving it is roughly the difference between a 180-point week and a 165-point week, a third of the time.