(Written by kencraw)

It’s that time of year when all the meaningful pre-season polls come out. They’ve always bugged me for a number of reasons, although I fully admit they can’t be stopped, but there’s one explanation for where various teams are ranked that really bothers me:

“I ranked team X below team Y because of their difficult schedule”

Wait a minute… why should that matter?

I don’t think anyone would debate that a team that has a harder schedule might lose more games than a team that plays an easy schedule. However, at the end of the season, we hear left and right how team X should be ranked above team Y, even though they have a worse record, because they played a far tougher schedule.”

Point being, team X is however good team X is. How tough their schedule is, doesn’t change how good team X is. Theoretically, the end of season rankings take into account how tough team X’s schedule was and is supposed to measure just how good the team actually was.

What I think this troublesome trend indicates is an implicit admission that the end of season rankings DON’T appropriately account for strength of schedule and thus teams who play tough schedules will NOT have it properly accounted for, thus when predicting how the teams will be ranked at the end of the season, we’ve got to give them a hit.

To make it worse, since they all implicitly admit that, the LAST thing team X needs is to start the season with a disadvantage. Where one starts ranked can affect where one ends up at the end of the season. If 2 teams go 10-2, all other things being equal, the one who was ranked higher at the beginning of the season will still be higher at the end of the season.

So what do we have for team X? We have a system where they won’t be properly credited in the end of season polls for their tough schedule, starting out with a lower ranking merely because of that tough schedule, something that puts them at yet another disadvantage, when what they really need is a pre-season benefit to do something to try and offset the lack of credit they get for a tough schedule.

And we wonder why so many teams schedule so softly…