Examining ways to calculate how difficult a teams schedule will be
When thinking about team win totals and division bets, I like to consider each teams strength of schedule. If a team is favored to win a lot of games and has a high win total for the season, it could be easy to reason that team has an easy schedule. Unfortunately that isn’t always the case. For this exercise, I will once again turn to the NFL Team Schedule dashboard, and I will use the Detroit Lions as my example.
The above picture shows the 2025-26 season schedule for Detroit. The last 2 columns of the schedule are Opponent Win Total and Opponent Average Line Win Expectation. I like to use these to calculate a teams strength of schedule.
Starting with the Opponent Win Total. This is simple, take the win totals of each opponent, add them up and compare those results to the other 31 teams by ranking. The premise is simple, team win totals set by sportsbooks are based on how good the professionals think each team will be. Knowing that a team continuously has to play teams expected to compete for their division titles could help in deciding whether to bet OVER or UNDER that teams win total.
After adding up the win totals for all of Detroit’s opponents and comparing to the other 31 teams, you see that the Lions have the 3rd hardest schedule based on opponent win totals, on the left.
Using the opponents win expectations based on average lines is a good way to check these results. Use the line conversion chart to get the win expectations for the opponent. I used the average lines from the different sportsbooks, but you can also use power ratings if you have them. Once you have the win probability for every game the opponents will play, you can add them up to get the opponent expected win total. Once you have this number then you follow the same process as opponent win total, add up each teams expected wins and compare to the other 31 teams. When completing for Detroit they have the 5th hardest ranked schedule based on opponent win expectations from average sportsbook lines.
While the Lions are expected to contend for the NFC North division title once again, and are favored in 12 games at DraftKings, they must go through some tough teams. The Lions schedule has a few other quirks in it, particularly they play 5 teams off Monday Night Football. This is a good indicator that those opponents will be coming off of games against other quality opponents, hence they are playing on MNF. That could play into Detroit’s favor, but playing a top-5 most difficult schedule in the NFL indicates they will probably take a step back and go UNDER the season win total.