Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Non-conference Strength of Schedule

I've begun adding scheduled non-conference games into the 2017 T-Rank projections (courtesy of Reddit user itsbraile's Mega Schedule and a script I wrote to semi-automatically import that data). So I've also added a "Non-conference SOS" column to the 2017 page.

But this is not your daddy's non-conference SOS, so I thought a word of explanation was in order. The way I calculate non-con SOS is to calculate the record that an "elite" team would be expected to have against a given team's schedule. I do this because for good teams there's not much difference, in terms of expected chance of winning, between playing #351 and playing #251 at home -- and this system treats those games as practically identical for SOS purposes.

The NCSOS column on the T-Rank page is actually the expected losing percentage of an elite team against a given schedule, because that way higher is better.

Right now, Long Beach St. has the toughest non-con SOS (as it often does under Dan Monson). (Alabama St. is currently at 1.000 because I don't have any non-con games for their schedule yet). Of course, this will change as we learn more about the actual quality of the teams during the season, as we find out more about the actual non-con schedules, and as later rounds of holiday tournament schedules get on the schedule. So stay tuned!

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