Strength Of Schedule

Does strength of schedule have an outsized impact on results in Action PC Football?

Strength Of Schedule

I wanted to see if the strength of schedule modifier in the team settings in Action PC Football has any impact on how a team performs.

I took UTEP from the homebrewed 1980 Action PC Football database and created a blank database for that team alone. I made two copies of the team: UTEP-A and UTEP-B. The two teams are completely identical.

I then created a 10 game schedule: 5 games at home and 5 away, featuring only these two teams.

For the first round, I kept the “strength of schedule” modifier at the default setting of 2.

At the end of one round, this is how the teams did:

This is what we’d expect, right?

I then played with the Strength of Schedule setting for UTEP-A. I put it up to 5, leaving UTEP-B at 2. This was the result:

I then pushed UTEP-A up to 8, leaving UTEP-B at 2. Here was the result:

This surprised me.

I thought going into this that a higher strength of schedule would give one team an advantage over the other. Apparently I was wrong.

I then tested it once more, putting UTEP-A up to 10 while keeping UTEP-B at 2:

This was the result that floored me.

I thought for certain that the higher strength of schedule would give UTEP-A an uneven advantage, holding all other things equal. Interestingly enough, the exact opposite took place.

Finally, I ran 3 more tests, this time with UTEP-A at level 10 and UTEP-B at level 1:

Can we say anything conclusive here?

Well, I’m afraid the sample size isn’t quite large enough to exclude the possibility that this is just the random number generator doing its job.

However, I can also say that strength of schedule alone is not likely going to give one team an outsized advantage against another.

Let me know what you think. I’ve left commenting open to everybody on this post.