Yesterday, I asked how many wins a team full of recent draft picks and replacement-level NFL players would fare. I don’t think there’s a right answer to the question, but it might be a more important question than you think (and you’ll see why on Monday). But I have at least one way we can try to estimate how many games such a team would win.
Neil once explained how you can project a team’s probability of winning a game based on the Vegas pre-game spread. We can use the SRS to estimate a point spread, and if we know the SRS of our Replacement Team, we can then figure out how many projected wins such a team would have. How do we do that?
First, we need to come up with a mythical schedule. I calculated the average SRS rating (after adjusting for home field) of the best, second best, third best… and sixteenth best opponents for each team in the NFL from 2004 to 2011. The table below shows the “average” schedule for an average team: