Okay, so I’ve been diving deep into NFL stats lately, trying to get a better handle on predicting game outcomes. One thing that kept popping up was “SOS” – Strength of Schedule. I figured it was important, but I wanted to really understand it, so I decided to calculate it myself. Here’s how I went about it:
First, I grabbed a notepad and pen – yeah, I’m old school sometimes. I also opened up my trusty spreadsheet program on my laptop. I knew I needed a few key pieces of information:
- Every team’s schedule: Who they played, and when.
- Every team’s wins and losses: The basic record for each team.
I started by listing out all 32 NFL teams down the left side of my spreadsheet. Then, across the top, I created columns for each week of the season. I went team by team and meticulously filled in their opponents for each week. This took a while, no lie. Lots of double-checking to make sure I didn’t mess up.
Calculating Opponent Winning Percentage
Once I had the schedules all laid out, it was time for the math. The core of SOS is figuring out how tough a team’s opponents were. So, for each team, I calculated their opponents’ combined winning percentage. It’s pretty simple, really:
- I added up the total wins of all the opponents that a team played.
- I added up the total games of all the opponents that a team played.
- I divided the total opponent wins by the total opponent games. The result is a percentage, called the “Opponent Winning Percentage”.
I repeated this process for all 32 teams. I made sure to keep the results of each of these steps next to the appropriate team in the spreadsheet. Some teams had crazy high opponent winning percentages, others were much lower. It was already starting to paint a picture of who had a brutal schedule and who had a cakewalk.
The Final Touches
After all the calculating, I just took a step back and looked at the numbers, now that I have the “Opponent Winning Percentage” of all teams. It’s pretty clear which teams had the hardest schedules and which had the easiest. I felt pretty good about tackling this myself and getting a real hands-on understanding of Strength of Schedule. Now, it’s not just some abstract concept – I’ve actually built it from the ground up!