Strength of Schedule

[70Chip]

Random thoughts on NFL scheduling

An NFL schedule is comprised as follows:

Division Games: 6
Games against another division in the same conference: 4
Games against teams from the other two divisions in same conference that finished in the same position within that division as your team: 2
Games against a division from the other conference: 4

Next year we get:

NFC South, AFC South, Minnesota and St Louis? (2nd place in NFC North/West)

Its basically tough to catch an easy schedule unless you play in a weak division because it is unlikely that both the inter and intra conference division games will be against weak divisions. For example, this year we drew the NFC West (EASY) and the AFC West (HARD). Next year we play AFC South (AVERAGE) and the NFC South (AVERAGE). We were also unlucky this year in that although we were last in our divisionin 2004 (tiebreakers), our two random games (Tampa, Chicago) which should have been easy, wound up being against division champs. The whole conference was basically inverted.