Bye Week

If you are a football fan, you are familiar with the term “bye week.” That is a week off during the regular season schedule that your team doesn’t play a game. The bye is part of the NFL scheduling process and most college teams take one as well. This is the time of the pro football season when several teams each week get their bye.

In the NFL, during the bye week the players are normally given time off. The coaches, however, continue to work and game plan for the next opponent, which is usually 14 days away. A coaching staff often reviews the season to that point, talk about roster moves, look at what plays they may want to add, discuss schematic changes that could help their defense, etc. It is a week to pause and reflect and game plan for the rest of the season.

Inevitably, the announcers of an NFL game talk about the head coaches’ record coming off of their bye week. Usually, the folks behind the scenes also post a graphic showing the record of that coach. Good head coaches rarely lose coming off of their bye week. Andy Reid, John Harbaugh, and Mike Tomlin are the three best coaches in NFL history coming off of a bye. All three will be hall of famers and all three have won Superbowls. So it’s not surprising that they have excellent records when given extra time to prepare for a game.

Why is it that top tier coaches win coming off the bye? The answer is the primary message for this week’s Monday Huddle Up…..

During a normal game week, coaches are tied up with practices on top of game planning. On a bye week there are no practices, so the coaches can use that time to watch more game film and to spend a much larger percentage of their time strategizing about the next game. In sports, any small advantage you can get from that extra time could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Which brings us to this…..

When was the last time your organization took a bye week?

When have you completely shut down day to day operations for an extended period of time to map out the rest of the “season”? One day retreats are nice, however here we are talking about an extended window where planning is the focus and the daily grind is turned off. At HUG we do this once a year for a three day stretch, usually in December to plan the next calendar year. We evaluate what went well in the previous year, where we need to spend our time on going forward, what to eliminate, you name it. Everything is on the table. It is some of the most valuable time we spend together as a team each year. It is a small break to plot and plan, but a meaningful “bye” nonetheless.

Borrow a page out of the football coach’s handbook. Take a step back. Put regular operations on hold. Spend intentional time planning. Use your bye week to win the next “game.”