Adjusting Strength of Schedule

by Michael Beuoy

One of the more interesting components (to me) of Brian Burke's efficiency model is the strength of schedule adjustment. I found it interesting the way you could bootstrap yourself into a self-consistent opponent adjustment. Here is the description (link):

"To adjust for opponent strength, I could adjust each team efficiency stat according to the average opponents’ corresponding stat. In other words, I could adjust the Cardinals’ passing efficiency according to their opponents’ average defensive efficiency. I’d have to do that for all the stats in the model, which would be insanely complex. But I have a simpler method that produces the same results.

For each team, I average its to-date opponents’ GWP to measure strength of schedule. This season Arizona’s average opponent GWP was 0.51—essentially average. I can compute the average logit of Arizona’s opponents by reversing the process I’ve used so far.

The odds ratio for the Cardinals’ average opponent is 0.51/(1-0.51) = 1.03. The log of the odds ratio, or logit, is log(1.03) = 0.034. I can add that adjustment into the logit equation we used to get their original GWP.

Logit = Logit(ARI) – Logit(Avg) + 0.034
= 0.11

This makes the odds ratio e0.11 = 1.12. Their GWP now becomes 0.53. If you think about it intuitively, this makes sense. Their unadjusted GWP was 0.51. They (apparently) had a slightly tougher schedule than average. So their true, underlying team strength should be slightly higher than we originally estimated.

I said ‘apparently’ because now that we’ve adjusted each teams GWP, that makes each team’s average opponent GWP different. So we have to repeat the process of averaging each team’s opponent GWP and redoing the logistic adjustment. I iterate this (usually 4 or 5 times) until the adjusted GWPs converge. In other words, they stop changing because each successive adjustment gets smaller as it zeroes in on the true value."

The purpose of this post is to show how this iterative, multi-step adjustment can be translated into a single matrix, and how that matrix is actually independent of the ranking system being used. This matrix can then be used more generally as a measure of each team's "interconnectedness", based on the season-to-date games played so far.

First, to define some terms:

R0 = A 32 row vector whose ith row contains the "raw" ranking of team i. This ranking can be anything you want: Brian's logit model, win percentage, average margin, number of Tebows on the team, etc.

S = A 32 by 32 matrix where the ith row jth column entry contains the percentage of team i's games that have been played against team j.

In Brian's description of the model, he states that "For each team, I average its to-date opponents’ GWP to measure strength of schedule". This is just equivalent to multiplying the S matrix by the R0 ranking vector. That adjustment is then added to the original ranking. This creates a new ranking R1 = R0 + S * R0 = (1 + S) * R0. Then Brian just keeps applying that same step to each new adjusted ranking.

R2 = R0 + S*R1 = R0 + S*(1+S)*R0 = (1 + S + S^2)*R0

R3 = R0 + S*R2 = R0 + S*(1+S+S^2)*R0 = (1 + S + S^2 + S^3)*R0

and so on.....

RFinal = (1 + S + S^2 + S^3 + .....) * R0

If you're familiar with infinite series, you know that the sum in the parentheses would be equal to 1/(1-S) if S were a normal number less than 1. Fortunately, this also works for matrices, as long as we interpret 1/(1-S) as the matrix inverse of (1-S) (I'm glossing over some mathematical niceties here, but trust me that the math works in this case, with one caveat below).

Let's define this inverted matrix as the SOS matrix -> SOS = (1 + S + S^2 + S^3 + ...) = 1/(1-S).

So, your final strength of schedule adjusted ranking is just:

RFinal = SOS * R0

Where, as mentioned earlier, the SOS matrix is solely a function of which teams have played each other and has no dependence on the ranking system used.

I have compiled the details of the calculation (for the 2011 NFL Season through Week 9) in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. One technical note: In order to get the matrix inverse to exist, I had to tack on a "normalizer" matrix to S. This matrix takes a 32 row vector and subtracts out the mean of the vector. The net effect is to convert any ranking vector to one where the average ranking is zero.

One of the nice things about the SOS matrix is that it tells you how interconnected each team is to another team, based on the games they've played so far. For example, Green Bay has played both Denver and Chicago once, but the matrix is showing that GB is far more connected to Chicago than to Denver (an 0.20 factor vs. an 0.08 factor). This makes sense given that Green Bay and Chicago are in the same division and so have had more common opponents (their season to date performance is far more intertwined). So, to get a measure of Green Bay's schedule adjusted strength, you would add 0.20 of Chicago's strength, but only 0.08 of Denver's strength. Or, to get Indy's true strength, you would have to subtract 0.11 of PHI's strength. Indy hasn't played Philly, and they don't have many common opponents (the AFC South is not slated to play the NFC East this year). The +/- nature of the matrix is intuitive in that it penalizes teams that either are connected to poor teams (positive SOS times negative ranking), or disconnected to strong teams (negative SOS times positive ranking). Note that this only works when your ranking system is normalized to an average of zero, such that a below average team has a negative ranking.

To get a bit more technical, I think this adjustment is mathematically equivalent to a regression model with 32 variables (a dummy variable for each team) where each game outcome is modeled as:

game outcome = Team A - Team B

Where a positive outcome is one that favors Team A (but I haven't done a full derivation).

In the Google Docs spreadsheet, I used "Margin" as the game outcome dependent variable, but you could also use wins, difference in logit based on efficiency stats, etc. In addition, I think this is also equivalent to the very simple ranking system published at pro-football-reference.com.

Note: After typing this up, I realized that the calculation I've described differs somewhat from Brian's adjustment. It appears as if Brian averages GWP, converts that to logit, makes the adjustment, and then converts back to GWP for the next step. Mathematically, I think that introduces a non-linearity that my matrix approach couldn't handle. Still, I think the approach I've outlined still has merit, even if it's not mathematically identical to Brian's approach.