Data / 2026 season

Strength of
Schedule.

A useful metric that you should base decisions on?
Or smoke and mirrors?

01

What is Strength of Schedule?

Strength of schedule (SoS) is a statistic that tries to estimate how difficult a schedule a player or team will face for a given position. On this website, a SoS rank of 1 indicates that the team is expected to face the easiest opposition on average for that position. Conversely, a rank of 32 indicates that the team will face the hardest opposition for that position.

The basic idea is an easier schedule = more fantasy points.

02

How is it calculated?

There are two main ways to calculate strength of schedule.

  1. Predict how good each defense will be.
  2. Calculate how many points each team allowed to that position last season to rank defensive strength, then create a ranking from the new schedule.

This site assumes the latter, since predictions will change from person to person and site to site, whereas last season's results are observable and consistent.

03

How accurate is it?

Short answer? Some years are better than others. Below shows a single example from the 2025 season, and an interactive chart showing error across all teams by year for a given position, scoring format, and time window.
As can be seen from the Cardinals example, some positions were okay, while others were drastically wrong. You may have drafted James Conner with the expectation his schedule was incredibly easy, only for the actual schedule to be one of the hardest for RBs on the year. Vice versa with TE and Trey Mcbride.
The interactive graph shows average error, which takes all the SoS values for each team that given year and finds the error, then averages it. The max shows the single worst team's error from that year. The grey dotted line shows the absolute worst case median error score, which could be achieved if you ended up ranking them in reverse order, i.e. the easiest schedule was actually the hardest. The "random guess" line is the average error you'd expect to get if you randomly assigned some 1-32 number value to each SoS value. I won't go into the math on how that works (permutations), but the number is 10.66, so any worse than that and you would've been better off randomly guessing. You want error to be below (ideally significantly below) the random guess line to consider SoS a good metric.

2025 example

Arizona Cardinals

Standard scoring · regular season

Prediction vs actual
PositionPredictedActualError

Historical error

SOS prediction accuracy

Lower average rank error is better

Average Max Single Team ErrorWorst possible average Random guess

04

Should I use it?

Overall, strength of schedule (when ranked on last year's performance) is a shaky metric to base serious decisions on. Use it with care, and understand that it can be wildly inaccurate, or dead-on, without many great ways to tell which it'll be this year.

05

2026 strength of schedule predictions

Still set on using strength of schedule this year? Here's the predictions for how it'll go.

Rank 1 is the easiest schedule. Select a scoring format and schedule window. Click any position header to sort.

Scoring
Schedule
Loading 2026 predictions...
RankTeam