PDA

View Full Version : Comparison of ACC strength of schedule



UrinalCake
03-02-2015, 01:20 AM
I've been toying with a way to compare the in-conference strengths of the schedule for each of the top teams. It certainly seems like we have the toughest schedule, but is that REALLY true or are we just inherently biased? So here's what I did - first I divided the league into three "tiers" that basically follow the current standings:

TOP TIER
UVA
Duke
ND
Louisville
UNC

MIDDLE TIER
Syracuse
Pitt
Miami
NC State
Clemson

BOTTOM TIER
FSU
Wake
GT
BC
VT

Now I realize that some will argue that UNC should be a middle-tier team, or that NCState should be a bottom-tier team, or whatever. This was a good enough approximation for me and it worked out well that there are five teams in each tier. So then I looked at how many games each of the top teams played against the top tier ("hard games"), middle tier ("medium games"), and bottom tier ("easy games"). I further separated the data into home games versus road games.

Here's what I found. I'm a total novice with Excel so if someone has a better way to format the data, please let me know. Also I entered all of this data by hand, so it's entirely possible I made an error somewhere.

4826

4827

General conclusions:

- Duke does indeed have the hardest schedule in terms of most hard road games (4). UVA and ND each have 3, while UNC and Louisville have 2.

- Duke also has the most total hard games, though UNC and Louisville are tied with us (6). UVA and ND each have 5 hard games. So if you ignore the home/road effect, the teams are fairly even in how many hard games they play

- All teams have 6 medium games except for Louisville which has 7. Duke plays the fewest on the road, with 2.

- Louisville has the fewest easy games. They only have one easy game at home (by far the fewest of any of the teams) and 5 easy games total

- It is of course debatable whether you would rather play a medium game at home or an easy game on the road.

- Who has the hardest schedule overall? It seems like Duke based on the number of hard games, but I suppose you could argue that Louisville's is pretty tough too (same number of hard games, more medium games, more easy games on the road).

- Maybe someone could device a way to quantify this data into a single number.



Let me know what you guys think!

SCMatt33
03-02-2015, 08:42 AM
KenPom already does this based on his rating system. For the ACC teams at the top, UNC ranks 7, Louisville 8, Duke 11, ND 12, and UVA 15. Of course it would be expected that the top teams are mostly in the bottom half, as they don't have to play themselves. It also relies on his ratings, so a game against GT actually rates a tougher than Clemson, and nearly as tough as Pitt. (Those teams rank As 81, 83, and 76 overall).