The 2025 NFL schedule release has come and gone. Fans are flocking to the internet to purchase their tickets, experts are analyzing every aspect to see where teams might take off or find the basement, daily fantasy enthusiasts are stacking their teams with favorable Week 17 matchups, and the players on the teams are griping over their rest or holiday plans.

On last week’s episode on The Off the Charts Football Podcast, we decided to take a different approach. Using our data, we took a look at long term schedule trends and put our best experts to the test in a game show style episode. 

Our host, James Weaver, put together 10 questions in regards to long-term schedule trends (mainly going back to 2015) and his R&D team members, Alex Vigderman and Bryce Rossler, made guesses and discussed the answer.

Here is a recap on how the episode went:

Question 1: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of first-year coaches coming off 4 or fewer days of rest?

The Answer: 23%

You may refer to this as the “first-year coach Thursday Night death spot”, where the honeymoon phase goes to die for these coaches. Granted, first year coaches only win at a 44% clip overall, but this is considerably lower. The strength of the opponent is not factored in here and perhaps a better exercise would find how often these teams cover the spread.

Question 2: Since 2018, how many more injuries per game are there on Thursday games compared to Sunday games?

The Answer: Sunday 7.55, Thursday 7.64, Difference = 0.09 more on Thursday

As a point of clarification, we noted that injuries with a more severe initial grade (being taken off the field) was only 0.04 higher on Thursdays. So the impact here is negligible.

Question 3: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage for teams who take a bye coming back from international travel vs. teams that don’t take the bye (excluding Mexico)?

The Answer: Takes a bye: 21% lower winning percentage (42% vs. 63%)

Disclaimer: The answer is different from what was discussed in the podcast due to a calculation error. However, this is still a stunner. 45 teams who took the bye won only 42% of the time in their following game, while 19 teams who did not take the bye won 63% of their games!

As you could imagine, this left our contestants baffled and scrambling for an explanation on how this could be.

“The Jaguars have been bad, but not that bad.” 

– Alex on the Jaguars being the primary team coming back from London

Question 4: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of road teams playing in Florida in September (non-Florida road teams)?

The Answer: 57%

Alex’s guess of 47% stemmed from his belief that the Florida heat would be balanced out by the fact that those teams were generally worse over this stretch of time than the average team. But even with the heat advantage, the Dolphins, Buccaneers, and Jaguars still lost more games in September than won.

Question 5: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of road teams playing in Denver in September?

The Answer: 41%

If you consider the idea that playing in the altitude early in the season before peak conditioning is difficult, that gets you close to the correct answer. And remember, the Broncos have been a below-.500 team in this span overall.

Question 6: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of dome teams playing in cold climates in December? Cold climates include: Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Washington

The Answer: 48%

A little bit of a shocker here, as neither of our experts thought dome teams would fare that well.

Question 7: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of teams playing their 2nd straight home game?

The Answer: 57%

Question 8: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of teams playing their 3rd straight home game?

The Answer: 67%

This is a pretty high number, especially when considering that there is no reason for there to be a team quality effect here. However, in 2025, 6 of the 11 teams who have this advantage were playoff teams last year, including the Chiefs, Bills, Ravens, and Lions

Question 9: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of teams playing their 2nd straight road game?

The Answer: 44%

Question 10: Since 2015, what is the winning percentage of teams playing their 3rd straight road game?

The Answer: 43%, higher than either of our experts thought.

For the 3 straight home or road games, there were 166 cases of 3 straight home games and 61 cases of 3 straight road games. This does include games with a bye week in between.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to hear what else the guys had to say about the schedule.