Yes. While it would obviously be a problem for the team's revenue and would never happen, there are definitely some situations where no-showing or intentionally tying is better for playoff odds (or draft pick if you're tanking).
And the players, y'know, have to put food on the table.
Tanking doesn't really count for this because if the only goal for the season is to get the #1 pick, then of course you want to throw all your games. But if you're actually trying to do well . . .
You're heavily favored to lose and need to rest for a winnable game 4 or 5 days later
Over the past 10 seasons (my standard stats timeframe, didn't even look at seasons prior to that), teams win 52.8% of the time when coming off a bye. So a 2.8% increase. Forfeiting a game in order to rest up for the next game would functionally be a bye week. I know you specified Thursday games; there's likely not a meaningful amount of data regarding teams playing Thursday games off a bye. Conventional wisdom would say that a team coming into a Thursday game off a bye would have a sizeable advantage over a team coming off a game the previous Sunday, but for what it's worth, per a 2019 study, injury rates in Thursday games were actually less than those of Sunday and Monday games:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30848976/#:~:text=Results%3A%20The%20all%2Dcause%20injury,6%2C072%20per%201%2C000%20athletic%20exposures.
Whether that actually means anything is debatable. One might argue it's possible that players don't quite go 100% in Thursday games, but when you're getting paid millions to play only 17-20 games a year and there's four guys behind you on the depth chart ready to take your job at any moment, I would find it hard to believe that any player holds back in any game.
So all of that is to say, I suspect that with no other factors considered the hypothetical win probability of a team playing a Thursday night game off a bye against a team not coming off a bye is not much higher than that 52.8%. If we oversimplify it and caclulate it based on the marginal rest differential compared to a Sunday game:
14 day rest vs. 7 day rest: 7 day difference, team with more rest sees a win probability increase of 2.8%
14 day rest vs. 4 day rest: 10 day difference, so using a linear proportion, 2.8/7 = x/10, x=
4% win probability increase when forfeiting previous game
So now we compare that +4% to the win probability that the team loses in the game they forfeit. In the history of 538's game projections model, which dates back to I believe 2015, there has been exactly one game in which a team entered with a win probability of 4% or less: Giants at Eagles, 2022 week 18, in which it was known well in advance (and therefore taken into account for that 4%) that the Giants would be resting their starters to prepare for the playoffs.
So, my conclusion is that a situation in which forfeiting as a heavy underdog in order to rest for the next game - even if that game is on Thursday - increases the team's expected win total would be an extreme rarity and has not occurred in at least the last 8 seasons.
You both advance to the playoffs if you tie
Ah, 2021 Chargers/Raiders. Also an exceedingly rare spot to be in. It appeared with a couple minutes left in overtime that they were going to play to a tie, but once it became apparent to the Raiders that they had a chance to win on a long field goal and better their playoff seeding, they did. While the Raiders very, very slightly decreased their playoff chances by attemtping the field goal rather than kneeling and accepting the tie (due to the chance of the kick being blocked and returned for a Chargers touchdown), they definitely increased their Super Bowl odds by doing so, as they ended up playing the 4th-seeded Bengals rather than the 2nd-seeded Chiefs who blew them out twice that year. Ironically, it was the Bengals who went to the Super Bowl, but at the time you would have been hard-pressed to find someone who saw that coming (and I think Raiders fans would agree even now that they had a better chance to beat the Bengals than the Chiefs, that game was actually close).
Bottom line is, you can't rely on the other team to agree to tie with you, because they won't. Doing so would get you a big suspension anyways. The Chargers/Raiders game was 29-14 Raiders in the 4th quarter, so clearly the Raiders were out to win from the go, and the Chargers certainly expected as much.
It doesn't matter for your team what happens, so you no show and get some rest for the first playoff game
Yes, resting starters in meaningless week 18 games is commonplace.
Both teams are evenly matched, and since a tie is half a win rather than 1/3 like in soccer, it's better to take a 1/2 win and get some rest rather than play with the same expected value of 1/2 win
I mean, mathematically I get what you're saying, but it's
extremely oversimplified and goes against the entire concept of sports.
