The Dreaded Bye Round
Every team should beware their mid-season bye.
Statistics show that since the inception of the mid season bye round, not one club has mastered how to come out the other side of their week off with consistent success.
Byes returned to footy in 2011 when expansion side Gold Coast entered the competition, and every club has ‘enjoyed’ at least a week’s rest in each season since.
In numbers since 2012 — to include every year GWS has been involved — there have been results where a team coming off a bye has matched up against a team that played the week before.
It would be good to change this to 2 teams coming off the bye round to play one another.
The workload is immense, so wouldn’t they love a week off to refresh, get the body right to enhance future performance?
Maybe not to those who understand the numbers, with champion Data’s latest findings revealing teams coming off a bye lose more often than they win.
In 2016, Geelong earned the right to a week off and home preliminary final after holding off Hawthorn in a qualifying final for the ages — thanks to an errant Isaac Smith shot after the siren — meaning they played just one game in 27 days.
The Cats finished with a 17-5 home-and-away record that year, but were left to rue a 37-point loss to Sydney who jumped out of the gates to boot the first seven goals of the game and earn a spot in the Grand Final.
Chris Scott’s men lost every time immediately following the mid-season bye from 2013-2019, breaking their drought in 2020 and winning the past three years to 2023.
But there’s one club with an even worse mark – Gold Coast.
The Suns are 2-8 over the past decade, breaking a losing streak of eight games in 2022 with a win over Adelaide at Heritage Bank Stadium.
There is a team named Hawthorn with a better than average record!
Statistics show that over the past 10 years not one club has mastered how to come out the other side of their week off with consistent success.
In fact, just four clubs hold a winning record over that period in their first match after the break, with Hawthorn, Richmond, Fremantle and St Kilda all sporting a 6-4 win-loss mark since 2013 to 2023.
That’s as good as it gets.
Put simply, the bye rounds do not boost a team’s winning chances the following week, and teams seem best served by continuity.
Looking at the overall win and loss table above, the Hawks have been the main beneficiary of bye weeks — unsurprising given their success in the form of three flags during the 2010s — winning 11 of 16 matches after having a bye since 2012, with three of those losses coming in a recent set of consecutive years between 2018 and 2020.
Despite defeats in 2020 and 2021, the Tigers have won the most matches after a week off (13 from 19), while Adelaide, West Coast and Fremantle are the only other teams in the competition who have a positive winning record coming off the benefits of a one-week rest.
Gold Coast lay claim to the worst post-bye record having won just once (a 38-point win over the Saints in 2014) since joining the competition over a decade ago, but it’s the team that’s featured in 14 of the past 15 finals series’ that surprises the most.
The Cats have played 17 matches after a bye week and have won a woeful 23.5% of them — better than only the Suns – which is a far cry from their 66.5% general winning record over the same period.
Port Adelaide, despite a total percentage of 105.3% in post-bye encounters, also have a losing 6-11 record and win percentage of just 35.3%.
The Swans are in a similar boat but, in their case, have the third highest percentage (114.8%) of all teams coming off a bye, despite winning just eight from 18.
There has only been one draw, North Melbourne and GWS last year.
Many factors influence these results. There’s fixture imbalance, some in-game luck, and there’s the difficulty of opponents faced by teams. All of these results are then skewed by the pre-finals bye where we see sides facing a fellow flag contender.
With all of these factors, looking at pure overall win-loss might not tell us the full story, but to finish, let’s get back to our Hawks.
Will Hawthorn continue their run of good form post-bye and notch an away win against West Coast?
