The Myth of the First Place Schedule

(Posted June 15, 2021)

NFL Announcer #1: “[Blank team] really surprised last year.  Almost nobody predicted them to win their division, but they got hot down the stretch and finished 10-6, which was just good enough to win the division.”

NFL Announcer #2: “That’s true, and it was a great story, but repeating as division champs will be much tougher. They won’t sneak up on anyone this time around, and not only that, they are going to be playing a first place schedule this season.”

Anyone who has watched even a handful of NFL games since 2002 has heard some variant of this analysis at least once.  Those of us who watch a lot of football have heard it often, and many viewers accept it as something truthful and meaningful, and then repeat it to others.  But is this depiction of the first place schedule accurate? Is it actually significant? And do fans even understand what a first place schedule means, and how it relates to the overall concept of “strength of schedule”? No, no, and not really.

Let’s start with the concept of “strength of schedule” (SOS).  The NFL announces the schedule for the upcoming season each May, and immediately, numerous SOS analyses start appearing. The most widely used formula for calculating SOS is a simplistic one that looks at a team’s slate of games for the coming season, and ranks all 32 teams by calculating the winning percentage of each team’s opponents from the prior year. That’s it. Some of these formulas only count division foes once, while some count them twice.  A more nuanced SOS methodology and one that is favored by ESPN and others goes a step further and factors in the winning percentage of the opponents of a team’s opponents.  The advanced analytics community has largely rejected these approaches that focus on performance of opponents from the prior season, and utilizes a variety of more forward-looking metrics to gauge the strength of each opponent on the schedule, such as Vegas projected win totals or super bowl odds.  And some of these analyses also delve into other, less obvious SOS factors.  More on that later.

Getting back to the questions laid out above, as an experiment (and a very non-scientific one at that), I asked a dozen or so people who follow the NFL this question: For teams in the same division, how many games on the season schedule are not against common opponents; or put another way, by how many games do schedules differ for teams in the same division?  The fans I asked ranged from casual fans to very engaged ones, and I made sure that each respondent understood that the NFL uses the prior year’s division finish as a partial basis for setting the schedule for the next season (they all were aware of this, except for one), and that for purposes of this exercise, a head-to-head division game does not count as a game that “differs” on the schedule for two teams in the same division, since they are playing against each other in that game.  The responses ranged from a differential of two games to six, with the most common response being four.

The answer, of course, is just two games.  And that has been the case since the NFL went to its current scheduling format in 2002, when the Houston Texans joined the league and brought the total number of franchises to 32, divided into eight divisions of four teams each.  Under this format, the annual schedule is as follows: each NFL team plays its three division foes twice each (home and home), and plays all four teams from one division in its conference and one division from the other conference, which gets us to 14 games in common (again, treating head-to-head games as an identical matchup for the two teams involved).  The final two games are the ones that differ based on the prior year’s finish, as each team is slated against one team each from the two remaining divisions in the team’s conference, with first place teams matched up against each other, second place teams matched up, etc. Got it? Sounds confusing, but it is pretty simple.

That two game scheduling differential based on division finish will go up to three games this season, as the NFL has added a 17th game. For each team, that extra game is going to be an inter-conference game against a team that finished in the same place in the standings in its division the year before.  So the “first place schedule” will be a little more important going forward.  Even still, for the past 19 seasons, the importance of the first (or last) place finish and its impact on overall strength of schedule has been overstated and misunderstood, and those misconceptions will likely continue going forward.

I am not saying that in a sport that has a schedule that only lasts 16 games, a differential of two games is inconsequential.  It is 12.5% of the schedule.  But the fact remains that for division foes, from 2002 to 2020 only two games each year have been against non-common opponents, and since the quality of NFL teams changes from year to year, and since weaker teams in a division have to play the stronger teams in the division twice per year, the potential variance created by two or even three games against non-common opponents is not enough for analysts to keep discussing it as if it is a major factor, especially when other variables have a big impact on SOS.  

First off, much of the winning percentage differential that these two (now three) games can create simply offsets the differential created by the intradivision head-to-head games, and this results from the simple fact that a team cannot play itself.  Yes, the Bills (12-4 in 2020) have “differential” games against three 2020 division winners this year while the Jets (2-14 in 2020) instead get to play three last place teams in their “differential” games. But since the Jets and Bills play each other twice, factoring in those games more than makes up for this.  Using the simplest formula, these are the SOS rankings for the entire AFC East for 2021 (2020 finish is noted) (1) Bills - T-23 (.478), (2) Dolphins T-27 (.471), (3) Patriots - T-19 (.489), (4) Jets - T-19 (.489).  What is not surprising is that these teams all have a fairly SOS, given the overall commonality of opponents. What might be surprising is that the first and second place teams, on paper and using the simplest formula, play an easier schedule than the third and fourth place teams. 

Second, the best and worst teams don’t always stay that way from year to year.  Playing a team that finished in first place during the prior year is not always a punishment.  As an example, and staying in the AFC East, in 2019 the 12-4 Patriots won the AFC East (again) and the 7-9 Jets finished third.  So the Jets and Patriots had 12 identical opponents this past season, plus as division rivals they played each other twice, getting us to the 14 common matchups discussed above.  The AFC East played the AFC West in 2020, so the two “strength of schedule games” for the Patriots and Jets were against the teams in the AFC North and South divisions that finished the 2019 regular season in first and third place, respectively.  So the Patriots had to play the Ravens (2020: 11-5, playoffs) and Texans (2020: 4-12), while the Jets had to play the Browns (2020: 11-5, playoffs) and Colts (2020: 11-5, playoffs).  Advantage, the 2019 Division champion Patriots. Of course, the expected advantage over time is for the lower finishers in the standings, and that’s usually the case, but it often is only a very minor edge, or a wash, and on occasion it can be an advantage to the lower placed team, as in this example.

But even if we discount the intra-division differential (because playing against division rivals is often a challenge, regardless of each team’s record), and assume that there has been some scheduling disadvantage for first place finishers due to these two “differential” games (three games, starting this year) against better teams, we are still only talking about a couple of games difference, and this is still just one factor in the annual exercise of trying to determine SOS. 

Obviously, things happen during the course of a season that impact how hard a schedule ends up being, and playing a particular team in week 3 can be very different than playing that same team in week 16 for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is injuries.  Some teams get much better as the season wears on, and some teams fall apart. But we usually cannot know these things at the start of a season.  However, there are some things we can be pretty sure of, just by looking at how the schedule is constructed, that can tell us a lot about how easy or hard a schedule is on paper beyond just how tough the slate of teams on the schedule appears to be.

To truly understand how difficult the scheduled slate of games is for a team, the analysis needs to go beyond straightforward calculations that just measure the perceived strength of opponents, and look at other elements in the schedule.  These include such things as cross-country, trans-atlantic and other lengthy travel, placement of the bye week, number and placement of prime time games, disbursement of home and road games throughout the season, games played on short rest, number of games indoors and outdoors (which matters more for certain teams), etc.  It is not an uncommon thing for a few teams each year to get stuck with the dreaded stretch of 4 games in 17 days, which can get exacerbated if there is extensive travel involved.  It is also not uncommon for teams to have late season stretches of three road games in four weeks, or to have a stretch of three straight road games at some point in the season.  Certain teams play games out of the country, with half of them losing a scheduled home game. These and other somewhat hidden factors can significantly impact the ease or difficulty of a team’s schedule. 

The advanced analytics community digs into these factors. For fans who want to go deep into the analytics on this, or who want to bet on season win totals for different teams, I recommend Warren Sharp of Sharp Football Analysis, who puts out an annual SOS analysis that is a lot of fun to digest and that looks at a lot of the factors mentioned above. Sharp’s SOS analysis starts with the projected Vegas win totals for the coming season, and then goes from there.

I root for the Miami Dolphins.  The Dolphins finished second in the AFC East this past season, which gives them a “second place schedule”. The three “differential” games that result from that finish are against the Raiders, Ravens and Giants.  From the standpoint of who the Bills, Patriots and Jets play instead, and how that could impact the fight for the division title, that is just one small piece of a larger analysis of the comparative difficulty of the schedules that these four teams have to navigate this season. So the bottom line is this: I will continue to tune you out, Announcer #2.