NFL Strength of Schedule Projections

Evaluating teams’ remaining slates

Football is unpredictable–even at the NFL level–for a lot of reasons. There’s all your cliches: it’s a game of inches, games aren’t played on paper, etc. There are match-up peculiarities, small sample sizes and just plain luck. Yet, sometimes the ‘unpredictability’ is because, especially early in the season, a lot of what we predict is based on projections tied to previous years. Now, every team has at least a quarter of its season played and several teams are 5 games in. So the 2017 season can really start to mean something in and of itself for projecting ahead.

One way to capitalize on this is to look at the schedule ahead for each team. Before the season, most strength of schedule metrics are measured by opponents’ prior year win percentage. That yielded this list: Continue reading “NFL Strength of Schedule Projections”