It’s often the days between gamedays that determine the outcome of the action on the field. And it’s not just the practices and the drills and the film study and the gameplan meetings, but simply how many days a team has to recuperate from their most recent battle that sometimes matters just as much.
Coaches always place a great deal of importance on rest days, but thanks to an NFL schedule that has over the years increasingly sprawled from exclusively Sunday afternoons into Sunday primetime, Monday nights, Thursday nights, and even the occasional Saturday kickoff, a team often finds itself operating on a very different prep schedule than their opponent in any given week.
And thanks to the magic of flexing, some games can even be changed on the fly once the season is well underway. It all can either help a team on the short end of an abbreviated work week, or else make things more difficult by slashing valuable prep time, depending on the circumstances. Either way, it wreaks havoc on a coach’s preferred routine.
Here’s a quick look at the six games on the Cowboys’ 2023 schedule that- currently- have either Dallas or their opponent coming into the matchup with a rest advantage.
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