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If you've looked at the NFL schedule for Week 8, you may have noticed that EVERY team is playing. That might not seem like a big deal, but it's actually somewhat odd that there won't be any teams on a bye this week. 

For the 2023 season, the byes started in Week 5 with four teams getting the week off. In Week 6, we saw two teams go on a bye. In Week 7, if you struggled in fantasy, it's because there were SIX teams on a bye. 

As for Week 8, the NFL threw us a curveball by not having any teams on a bye, and people have definitely noticed.  

The 2023 season marks the first time in more than 10 years that a situation like this has come up. For the most part, the NFL has had a pretty consistent rule when it comes to byes: They usually start in Week 4, 5 or 6, and once they start, they usually run through Week 11, 12, 13 or 14. 

There's no official rule in place for the bye week, but once the byes start, the NFL almost aways runs them in consecutive weeks until every team has had a bye. The only exception to this rule comes on Thanksgiving week when the NFL usually makes every team play. (This year, Thanksgiving will fall on Week 12 and every team will be playing that week.)

Of course, even the Thanksgiving rule isn't set in stone. As recently as 2021, we saw two teams get a bye during Thanksgiving week. That being said, with the addition of the Black Friday game plus three Thanksgiving games, there's a good chance there won't be any Thanksgiving week byes going forward because the NFL will need some teams to play in the Sunday games that week.

 As for the Week 8 quirk this season, this marks the first time in 12 years that the NFL has scheduled out the byes like this. The last time it happened came in 2011 when the league randomly scheduled zero byes for Week 10. (During the 2011 season, the byes ran from Week 4 thru Week 11.) That being said, the NFL was hit with a lockout in 2011, and when the schedule came out in April of that year, it wasn't even clear if the season was going to start on time, so that could have played a factor in that quirk. 

The bye week has been evolving for more than a decade now. As recently as 2010, no team ever got a bye later than Week 10. However, the NFL has now pushed that out with the latest byes now coming in Week 14. (The Cardinals and Commanders are the only two teams with a Week 14 bye this season.) 

Teams seem to prefer a later bye, and there might be a reason for that: Almost every Super Bowl winner for the past 10 seasons has been a team that got a later bye. Five of the six Super Bowl winners since 2017 have had a bye in Week 10 or later. If you go back to 2014, eight of 10 Super Bowl winners have had a bye in Week 9 or later. 

Over the past 13 years, not a single team has won the Super Bowl in a season where it had a bye before Week 7. If that trend holds up, that means the Browns, Chargers, Seahawks, Buccaneers, Packers and Steelers won't be winning the Super Bowl this year. All six of those teams had a bye before Week 7.