Games against losing teams last year

[Mike M (the other one)]

(05-15-2022, 09:46 AM)KillerGoose Wrote: The data has to aggregated. I went ahead and manually did this for you and anyone else who is interested. Amongst the league, Cincinnati had the 29th ranked schedule based on opponent winning percentage. Amongst teams with a winning record, Cincinnati was tied for 15th out of 18 total teams. I will post some screenshots below.





You can also use PFR's SOS metric. It is grading each team by what their margin of victory is and how tough their opponents schedules have been. It is attempting to assess the quality of team and assign a number to them. Using this metric, Cincinnati had the easiest schedule in the entire league. I've mentioned before that I don't think this is the case, but they certainly did not have a difficult schedule. It was a soft schedule no matter how you look at it. 

So 9/14 playoff teams had the top 11 easiest schedules?

[KillerGoose]

(05-23-2022, 11:11 PM)Mike M (the other one) Wrote: So 9/14 playoff teams had the top 11 easiest schedules?

Yes, correct.

[seab0000]

This will allways be the case.  When you win games, your'e opponent's SOS automatically goes down for the year you play the game
This is why winning teams have the weakest SOS.  To better guage SOS you have to use prior year results.

[KillerGoose]

(05-24-2022, 12:54 PM)seab0000 Wrote: This will allways be the case.  When you win games, your'e opponent's SOS automatically goes down for the year you play the game
This is why winning teams have the weakest SOS.  To better guage SOS you have to use prior year results.

Teams change too much for this to be accurate, but I do understand the point you’re making. Cincinnati went from a squad that had the #5 overall pick to Super Bowl runner up. Using prior season data would classify them as an easy opponent. There are other examples of this as well, such as the Ravens and Browns making the playoffs in 2020 to both missing the playoffs and being completely mediocre squads in 2021. It’s just too inaccurate.

If you have the data from the season, you use that.

EDIT - I had forgotten about this. SOS is used as a playoff and draft position tiebreaker by the NFL. They use the win percentage in all games present on the schedule.

[seab0000]

So comparing Balt #6 SOS to Bengals #28

They played the same opponents in 14 games, so same SOS there, leaving 3 games that were different opponents.
Those games with SOS indicated    BALT    Indy #20, Miami #32, Rams #21 tie
                                            BENGALS     Jets #8 tie, SF #16, Jacksonville # 8 tie

It appears using this data the Bengals faced the better SOS.

[KillerGoose]

(05-24-2022, 02:31 PM)seab0000 Wrote: So comparing Balt #6 SOS to Bengals #28

They played the same opponents in 14 games, so same SOS there, leaving 3 games that were different opponents.
Those games with SOS indicated    BALT    Indy #20, Miami #32, Rams #21 tie
                                            BENGALS     Jets #8 tie, SF #16, Jacksonville # 8 tie

It appears using this data the Bengals faced the better SOS.

There is already a metric that does what you are trying to do here. It is ProFootballReference's SOS metric, where they assign a team a rating based on margin of victory and quality of opponents. Via this metric, the Bengals had the easiest SOS in the league. You can view this here. The reason this is the case is because the Jets and Jacksonville were two of the worst teams in the league. If the Jets and Jacksonville had those schedules and performed better, I would think this would be a great point. They, however, had that schedule and were dreadful.