Determining Hardest and Easiest Schedules
An exercise I like to complete each year while preparing for the upcoming season is determining who has the hardest and/or easiest schedule. There are lots of ways you can determine the strength of a teams schedule, the most common of which is using the prior year win percentage for each teams opponents. I never understood that reasoning, the performance of last years teams should be used to determine the actual strength of schedule for a team last year, not this year.
Instead, I like to use the projected win totals for each teams opponents. Add them up and compare, like in the chart to the left, and you can see who plays the most teams expected to win a lot of games. To me that is a better indicator of a teams schedule strength. It’s what’s expected to happen THIS YEAR, and determined by some pretty smart individuals that do this for a living. Will they be right on all of the projected win totals? No, but they will be close on most of them, so it’s a good barometer of expectations.
The chart is color coded with top-10 and bottom-10 teams highlighted in different shades of gray. I even added an average for the league, so it’s easy to see how much harder or easier each teams schedule is versus average. Based on the results it sucks to be in the AFC East and West divisions this year. The only team missing from the top-10 is Denver, and they are sitting at 12th. Minnesota cracks the top-10 thanks to there first place finish in the NFC North last year. Wonder if this year will be as easy for them. I asked my magic 8-ball and it said “Outcome doesn’t look good.” Washington and Arizona round out the top-10, and again that makes sense based on division opponents.
On the other side is the teams with the projected easier schedule. The clear winner here is the NFC South, with 3 of the 4 teams making an appearance in the bottom-10. There are 3 divisions with 2 teams in the bottom-10: NFC West, NFC North and AFC South. Somehow Philadelphia has a bottom-10 schedule strength, which surprised me because they won the division last year. Either way, it’s clear to see that the AFC teams have a much harder regular season than the NFC teams.
Another way to complete a similar exercise is to use the weekly lines that many sports books have posted already. I used the lines from 3 sportsbooks for lines 2-18 and 4 sportsbooks for week 1. From those lines we can calculate the win expectancy rate for each team. Just like the Average Line Expected Wins I wrote about last week, but instead for each teams opponents. I like this because it’s another way to use the current season projections to rate how difficult a path each team will have to maneuver.
The results from this exercise look very familiar to the opponent win total chart. The top-10 most difficult schedules are from the same teams, albeit a slightly different order. The same is true for the easiest-10 schedules. Knowing this, I’m probably going to play UNDER on the win totals for teams from the AFC and save my OVER plays for teams from the NFC.