How Tough is Your Team's Schedule?

Hi All!

Welcome back to Goosepoop, newsletter #31!

For readers who this is their first post, let us extend an extra welcome! You are now part of a community of almost 500 Michigan high school football nuts. We’re glad to have you, and we deeply appreciate your support.

Today we’ll be covering strength of schedule ratings for all 500 11-man football teams in the State. To do this, we will be using a new metric that we have not discussed here before: each team’s Goosepoop computer model rating.

If you want an introduction to what the Goosepoop computer model rating means, check out the twitter thread below. This will give you a short primer on our computer model, how it’s similar to other models you may have seen, and how you can interpret your team’s rating.

While you’re there, you can also check out some of our other recent posts. We’ve got one on how the users of the Playoff Wizard are predicting each team’s 2022 record:

And a post on which teams our computer model is predicting will improve the most in 2022:

Check these out - these are a flavor of the content we’ve got in store for the remainder of the 2022 preseason.

Finally, before we get into it, don’t forget to subscribe & share below. The only way we can grow and spread our content is through your help.

The Goosepoop Computer Model

Before we talk strength of schedule, let’s start with a brief overview on the basis of today’s content: the Goosepoop computer model.

The Goosepoop computer model is a new addition to our content this year. It assigns a rating to each team in the State; this rating can then be used to compare the expected point differential between two different teams, if they were to play a game.

For instance, let’s say we have two teams. If the model were to assign a 21.0 rating to Team A, and 14.0 rating to Team B, the model is predicting that Team A would beat Team B by 7.0 points.

So, how does the model assign its ratings? One simple metric: historical point differentials.

The math is a bit complicated (you can read up on it here - I don’t claim to have invented it), but, suffice to say, if Team A has beaten Team C by 10, but Team B only beat Team C by 3, the model will credit Team A’s rating for having won by 7 more points than Team B. Conversely, Team B’s rating will be negatively affected for having won by 7 less points than team A.

Using the Model to Assess Strength of Schedule

While we cannot yet use the Goosepoop computer model to assign ratings to this year’s teams (there’s been no games and thus there are no point differentials to work with), we can work with last year’s data. Doing this will give us our model’s final rating of each 2021 team.

With the final 2021 ratings for each team, we can take the average rating of a given team’s 9 2022 opponents. This metric, which we are calling the “SoS Rating” in the tables below, is a good measure of the relative strength of each team’s schedule.

For instance, the team playing the toughest schedule in the State, Detroit Catholic Central, has an SoS Rating of 32.4. This means that their 9 opponents average a Goosepoop computer model rating of 32.4. Some may be higher (DeWitt has a rating of 53.3), and some may be lower (UD Jesuit has a rating of 13.6), but the average of their 9 opponents is 32.4; thus, their SoS Rating is 32.4

Now that you understand our approach, let’s get into the numbers. Below, we’ve calculated each 11-man team’s SoS Rating. We’ve also included two further pieces of information: where the team in question’s schedule ranks relative to those in its division, and where that same schedule ranks overall. In both cases, the higher the number, the stronger the schedule.

Division 8 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: -21.2

• Strongest Schedule: Unionville-Sebewaing

• Weakest Schedule: Mount Clemens

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 7 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: -13.0

• Strongest Schedule: Detroit Loyola

• Weakest Schedule: Southfield Bradford

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 6 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: -12.4

• Strongest Schedule: GR West Catholic

• Weakest Schedule: Dearborn Heights Star Int’l

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 5 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: -2.7

• Strongest Schedule: Detroit Country Day

• Weakest Schedule: Detroit U Prep

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 4 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: 4.0

• Strongest Schedule: Orchard Lake St Mary’s

• Weakest Schedule: Detroit East English

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 3 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: 7.7

• Strongest Schedule: Brother Rice

• Weakest Schedule: Detroit U Prep Science & Math

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 2 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: 7.1 (lower than Division 3 - interesting!)

• Strongest Schedule: Okemos

• Weakest Schedule: Royal Oak

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

Division 1 SoS Ratings

• Median Rating: 14.0

• Strongest Schedule: Detroit Catholic Central

• Weakest Schedule: Detroit Western

Top Half of Schedules:

Bottom Half of Schedules:

That’s all for today’s post! Thanks for reading everyone!

Stay tuned for TWO of our other upcoming preseason features, where we’ll talk about:

• The Goosepoop Computer Model’s projection for each team’s 2022 record

• How users of our Playoff Wizard prediction model are predicting each team’s 2022 record

These will be dropping next week - subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss out!