The National Football League released the 2008 regular season schedule this week to much fanfare amongst hardcore fans and media coverage.
It is another step in a long list of offseason milestones to help obsessive fans like myself get excited for 2008 and for the major media outlets to make far too big of a deal about each teams strength of schedule. The problem is that the strength of schedule for the 2008 seasons is based on the combined record of opponents for their performance last season. This is a very logical argument, considering how injuries, roster turnover and coaching changes can change the fortunes of a team so quickly.
I heard plenty of disclaimers regarding the problems of using strength of schedule during the schedule release shows on April 15. But, I also heard plenty of talk about how incredibly difficult the Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts schedules are and how easy the New England Patriots 2008 slate of games should be. It seems that all the high paid ‘experts’ decided to just cover their own asses by making a disclaimer before commenting on how a (projected) difficult or easy schedule can make or break a teams season.
I decided to take the time to help out the ‘experts’ and do a little research to see how valid the preseason strength of schedule was in 2007. The results favor the argument that basing schedule strength off of last year’s results is very inaccurate.
Take for example the projections for the Patriots schedule. New England was said to have the third most difficult schedule based on the results from 2006 (.535 opponents winning percentage). In actuality Darth Belichick’s bunch had the seventh easiest schedule in the league last season (.469 opponents wining percentage).
On the flip side last year was the Chicago Bears and how they were projected to have the second easiest schedule (.465 opponents winning percentage in 2006), but ended up having the third most difficult schedule (.543 opponent winning percentage in 2007).
All told 19 of the 32 teams had projected strength of schedules that were 20 percentage points off of what they actually ended up being. If that isn’t convincing enough, eight of the 32 teams were more than 50 percentage points off their projected strength of schedule for the 2007 season.
To me this makes all projected strength of schedule arguments illegitimate. When ‘experts’ start talking about a particular team or players (for fantasy purposes) chances for next season and the “they have an easy schedule” argument emerges from the cavern they call their minds, put the earmuffs on and move along, because they obviously are spewing crap.
Fact is the state of the NFL is in such flux from year to year there is no way to accurately project anything based off last seasons numbers. So fret not Steelers and Colts fans, your 2008 schedules will likely not be as grueling as some ‘experts’ may try and lead you to believe.