Guide · 5 min read
Strength of schedule, explained
Teams play about a dozen games out of hundreds of possible opponents, so schedules vary widely. A record means little without knowing who it came against.
Three ways to measure it
- Opponents’ record. The oldest method: add up your opponents’ wins and losses. It is easy to compute and easy to fool, because opponents’ records depend on their schedules too.
- Opponents’ opponents. The usual fix, used in various forms for decades: blend in your opponents’ opponents’ records. Better, but still blind to margin and venue.
- Average opponent rating. Use a power rating for every opponent and average them. Because the ratings already account for everyone’s schedule, this goes as many levels deep as the data allows.
What the Power Board shows
Our schedule strength number is the weighted average power rating of every opponent a team has faced, on the same points scale as the ratings. A schedule strength of +8 means the typical opponent was 8 points better than an average team in the dataset. It uses the same game weights as the rating itself, so recent games count a little more.
On every team page, the breakdown also ranks that schedule within its division.
Schedule strength is not a bonus
A common mistake is to add schedule strength on top of a rating, as if playing good teams were an achievement in itself. In a least-squares rating it is already inside the number: a loss to a great team costs less than a loss to a poor one, and a win over a great team earns more. Adding an explicit multiplier would count the same thing twice.
Where schedule strength does belong is in judging a résumé. A 9-2 record against a hard schedule can be more impressive than 11-0 against a soft one, and our résumé rank measures exactly that trade-off.
Where to look
Sort any rankings table by “Schedule” to see the hardest and easiest slates, or open a team page for its opponent-by-opponent results with each opponent’s current rating.