If a team's strength of schedules (SoS) has ever caused you to draft or fade a player, the following paragraphs are for you. Applying data analytics from 2022 to 2025, it's clear that SoS alone is not an accurate measure of a player's fantasy value.
Among the teams with the five "easiest" SoS's (based on opposing teams' previous year's winning percentages) entering each of the past four seasons -- 20 teams in all -- only three (15%) finished that season in the top five in offensive yards, compared to four (20%) that finished in the bottom five in offensive yards. Additionally, only four of these teams (20%) finished that season in the top five in offensive points, while three (15%) finished in the bottom half.
The average offensive-yardage rank
for these 20 teams was 16.2. The average offensive-points rank? Also 16.2. So teams with the easiest SoS were, on average, middling offensive producers, which, by extension, impacts fantasy production.
Even more strangely, among the five teams each season with the toughest upcoming SoS (20 total teams), their average offensive-yardage rank was 13.9, while their average offensive-points rank was 14.0.
How could teams with supposedly the toughest schedule rack up, on average, more offensive yards and more points scored than teams with supposedly the easiest schedule? To learn more, listen to this recent podcast episode.
This article originally appeared on Touchdown Wire: Teams' strength of schedule has nothing to do with fantasy production
