Bye week bonanza for Notre Dame and every Power Five program

After the ACC announced their 2020 football schedule and (unsurprisingly) made sure to have three of its programs penciled in for a bye before facing the Notre Dame Fighting Irish — fans started wringing their hands over the schedule quirk.

Perhaps it was just an overreaction. (Also a chance to roll our collective eyes at seeing the Clemson Tigers as one of the teams with a BYE before Notre Dame). After all, three ACC opponents had byes last year,and the Irish won those games. In fact, over the last 3 years, Notre Dame is 14-1 against its ACC foes (not including the Cotton Bowl).

Are bye weeks even that important? I looked up each Power 5 team’s 2019 schedule to see if I could find something extraordinary, and after I finished — I found it to be fairly ordinary.

There are, of course, examples of big wins coming off of a bye, but they are very few. In 2019, every Power 5 team in the country had 2 bye weeks — except the USC Trojans. In many of the post-bye games, the team was facing a conference foe coming off of their own bye.

It’s important to remember these things that have been said before:

• Notre Dame was undefeated against teams that had a bye the week before.
• Notre Dame got their asses kicked by Michigan after the Irish bye week.

So... it could just be that we have all made more out of the bye week than what they really are — and in some cases — they can be done poorly. The bye week should just be looked at as a chance to get a little rest and healing in, and a time that has to be handled properly to stay dialed in on the task of the season in front of them.

Shit. It sounds a lot more tricky than just saying that it gives a team an extra week of prep — because it IS more tricky than that.

This is all a long-winded way of saying... maybe we should not get so worked up about all of these BYE weeks for teams right before they play Notre Dame. It just doesn’t seem to matter much.