The Chargers first primetime game is against the Ravens on Monday Night Football. It feels like that one was going to be on national TV all the way give the coaching and front office connections, no?
“All those connections really just add on top of what is already a great AFC contender matchup. It’s two really good football teams, two great quarterbacks going at it. That one, we used to call it The Harbaugh Bowl, but it still has that same level of engagement and same level of excitement and we wanted to make sure it was going to be in a featured window. We really liked it on Monday night and Week 10 is ideally when teams are starting to hit their stride. To see those two teams battle each other that week is going to be really exciting.”
The Chargers have a Week 7 bye and it falls in the middle of a seven-game gauntlet against top-tier teams from Weeks 3 to 10. Was the bye put there to help break that section up a bit?
“Not necessarily. I think byes are ones that we are not carving out in a specific week. It’s such a complex puzzle that they are certainly things we have to let float. We go through thousands of schedules. Nobody is going to get a bye earlier than Week 5 and nobody gets a bye in Week 12 because games are so spread out over that window. And nobody gets a bye after Week 14. So, within those parameters, we kind of let the puzzle do its work in our computer software. Not necessarily saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got these stretch of teams so here’s a bye to catch your breath.’ But when it falls there organically, it is a good fit and I think it could be a good fit for the Chargers in Week 7.”
The Chargers have four cross-country trips to Buffalo, Baltimore, Tampa Bay and Miami. Do you always try to space those out if possible?
“We look at it the same way that we do of East Coast teams having to play out there. If teams are interested in pairing back-to-back games together and staying on the East Coast, we’ll factor that in. If it happens, then it’s OK for them to be in consecutive weeks. If a team is against that, then we make sure we’re not stacking trips like that so we avoid something like East Coast trip, home game and then back to the East Coast. There are still trips that have to get made and they’re going to be tough wherever they fall, we just try not to stack them on top of each other.”
The Chargers play four games where their opponent is coming off of a bye. Was that just a quirk in how the schedule was made?
“It’s a little bit of that. We do thousands of different solved puzzles and byes can really bounce around. That combination, combined with any given team and the order in which they play their opponents, has the chance to fluctuate one direction or another. We ultimately landed on this one. However, we’ve also looked closely at a lot of data over the past few years and what we’ve found is that we are not far off from a 50-50 [winning percentage] in playing opponents coming off their bye. I think it’s no longer the obvious disadvantage it used to be. We’re seeing trends of teams staying in rhythm being beneficial rather than teams breaking for their bye and then coming back to get ready. But more broadly, teams that are playing well tend to win those games in a string of a good season. And teams that are broadly having a down year tend to have a rough time with those games. It really tends to coincide with the team’s overall record. We certainly don’t want a team facing a team coming off its bye throughout the entirety of the season … but it’s something we don’t automatically think is a competitive disadvantage like it may have been in some older methods on how teams handled their bye.”