Well the undefeated streak is over! North Carolina finally fell to defeat, at home no less, to the Utah Royals. However, as a testament to how far ahead of the field they were, they remain as the #1 team. They should still cruise to the shield as they have an 11 point lead over Seattle (who has 2 games in hand) for 2nd and are 14 points ahead of Portland (who has 1 game in hand) for the final playoff berth.
As always, here’s a quick reminder of how I arrive at these rankings:
The SFPI has two main components: “Performance Score,” which is determined 100% by on-the-field results, and “Strength of Schedule,” which takes the average Performance Score of all of a team’s opponents to date, with a mechanism to account for games on the road.