Belichick is ecstatic after checking out his team’s schedule.
The way to do this is to take the point spread in each game, adjust for home field (except for the five international games), and then determine by how many points Vegas thinks Team A is better than Team B. For example, when the Jets are favored by 6 points in a home game against the Dolphins, we can take this to mean that Vegas thinks New York is about three points better than Miami. When we see that the Jets and Dolphins game is a pick’em for the matchup in Miami, this helps reinforce that view. And when Vegas says the Jets are a pick’em against the Browns at home, that tells us that Vegas thinks the Jets are about 3 points worse than the Browns *and* that the Dolphins are about 6 points worse than Cleveland. Using the iterative SRS process, and because the transitive property of point spreads applies, we can generate team ratings based on the 240 point spreads involved.
Here’s how to read the table below, in each case excluding week 17 action. After adjusting for home field advantage, the Patriots are expected to beat their average opponent by 6.6 points. On average, New England’s opponents (after adjusting for *their* strength of schedule) are 1.0 points below average, which means the Patriots are expected to be 5.5 points better than average (difference due to rounding). That’s the best in the league; the worst team in the league is the Cardinals.
We can also take these generated ratings to produce full-season Strength of Schedule ratings. The only changes we need to make are to include week 17 games and also make these ratings adjusted for home field. You might think we don’t need to adjust for home field, but given that there are 5 neutral site games, it means 10 teams will have an uneven number of home and road games.
When we do that, we see that the Patriots have the easiest schedule in the NFL this year. Note that to be clear, this is NOT because New England’s opponents are expected to be worse because they played New England; after all, these schedules are derived by iteration, which means New England’s opponents’ ratings are adjusted for that fact. And as you can see, the entire AFC East has a very easy schedule — the Patriots schedule is just easier than the rest of the AFC East because New England gets two games against a non-Patriots AFC East foe, while the rest of the AFC East has two games against the Patriots.
The AFC East schedule this year is very easy for three reasons: the AFC East is the worst division in the NFL (average SRS rating of -1.3), and the AFC East plays the two other worst divisions in the NFL: the NFC East and AFC North. The full SOS ratings below, and here’s how to read it: The Oakland Raiders have the toughest schedule in 2019, with an average opponent being 0.9 points harder than average (the Raiders also have only 7 home games, which is included in that average). Oakland is in the AFC West, and that division faces the AFC South and NFC North this year.
As you can see, New England’s schedule is last in the table, and by a large margin (an average opponent that is 1.3 points weaker than average). This isn’t so much the Patriots “fault” as a fact that New England is simply the beneficiary of a lot of good fortune. Only two games each season are assigned based on last year’s record, and New England gets Kansas City (at home) and Houston (away) in those games. But the other 14 games all come against the three worst divisions in the NFL, which is true of all other AFC East teams. Here are the ratings for each division:
The AFC West, meanwhile, in addition to being the toughest division in the NFL by SRS, faces the second toughest division in the AFC (the South) and then the toughest division in the NFC (the North). So the Raiders, who don’t benefit by playing themselves, have the toughest schedule, while the Broncos have the second toughest.
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