Over the last few days, I’ve started seeing articles like this one pop up on the Internet. It’s a yearly exercise that many NFL analysts perform: using records from the previous season to predict the strength of schedule a team is going to face in the upcoming season.
Is it relevant? Is the difficulty of a team’s schedule before the season starts a useful metric in figuring out how the team is going to perform in the season itself?
Not really, no.
I took a look at how the whole thing played out in practice last season.