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The NFL's version of Two Face.

The 2011 Giants were one of the more confusing teams in recent memory. Will this year’s the Giants play like the defending Super Bowl champions or the team that allowed more points than they scored last season? Jason Lisk points out that there’s a third option, and we should consider the 2011 Giants as a 13-7 team that faced an extremely difficult schedule.

Let’s start by recognizing that the 2011 Giants faced a difficult schedule in the regular season; not only was the NFC East competitive, but New York also faced the top four teams in the NFL outside of their division. In 2011, the Giants ranked 13th in the Simple Rating System. For the uninitiated, the SRS is a predictive system, which means it could theoretically place a 3-5 team ahead of a 7-1 team. The SRS mimics the points spread you would see in Las Vegas rather than a power ranking system. As the name implies, it’s simple in the sense that it only looks at two variables: strength of schedule and margin of victory. Each game is given equal weight. A win by 10 points over a team that is 5 points below average is equal to a 5-point win over an average team. The SRS is always just the sum of the margin of victory and the opponent’s rating. Unlike many systems, in the SRS, the values have meaning. A team with an SRS rating of +6.0 means that team is six points better than average.

It’s complicated to create these ratings, but I’ve done the heavy lifting [1]The tricky part is that each team’s strength of schedule is dependent on the ratings of each of their opponents, which is dependent on the ratings of each of their opponents, which includes the … Continue reading. Here were the SRS ratings for each team immediately after week 17 last season:

RkTmMOVSOSSRS
1New Orleans Saints13-1.611.4
2Green Bay Packers12.6-1.211.4
3New England Patriots10.7-1.49.3
4San Francisco 49ers9.4-1.18.3
5Baltimore Ravens7-0.96.1
6Detroit Lions5.40.66.1
7Pittsburgh Steelers6.1-0.85.3
8Philadelphia Eagles4.30.54.7
9Houston Texans6.4-1.94.5
10Atlanta Falcons3.30.33.5
11Chicago Bears0.80.91.7
12Dallas Cowboys1.40.31.6
13New York Giants-0.421.6
14Miami Dolphins1-0.10.9
15New York Jets0.900.9
16San Diego Chargers1.8-0.90.9
17Seattle Seahawks0.40.40.8
18Cincinnati Bengals1.3-0.90.5
19Tennessee Titans0.5-1.5-1
20Carolina Panthers-1.40.1-1.3
21Arizona Cardinals-2.30-2.2
22Buffalo Bills-3.90.5-3.4
23Washington Redskins-4.90.8-4.1
24Oakland Raiders-4.6-0.3-4.9
25Denver Broncos-5.1-0.2-5.3
26Cleveland Browns-5.60.2-5.4
27Jacksonville Jaguars-5.4-0.3-5.6
28Minnesota Vikings-6.81.1-5.7
29Kansas City Chiefs-7.9-0.2-8.1
30St. Louis Rams-13.42.9-10.4
31Tampa Bay Buccaneers-12.92.3-10.6
32Indianapolis Colts-11.70.4-11.3

[continue reading…]

References

References
1 The tricky part is that each team’s strength of schedule is dependent on the ratings of each of their opponents, which is dependent on the ratings of each of their opponents, which includes the original team we’re trying to rate. If you adjust each team’s rating over thousands of iterations, eventually the ratings converge, and we’re left with “true” ratings
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