11-06-2023, 05:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-09-2023, 02:02 PM by lemonoppy. Edited 2 times in total.)
Scheduling, particularly out-of-conference scheduling, has been notable topic of discussion within league spaces lately. There seems to be growing discontent about the lack of transparency in the scheduling process, and with certain out-of-conference matchups seeming to occur much more frequently than others. Out of curiosity more than anything, I took a crack at solving some of the current issues around scheduling, and I was rather pleased with what I came up with.
First, a clear statement of the broad goal --
Create a simple, transparent, and equitable system for out-of-conference scheduling.
Next, some definitions --
Simple -- Easy for anyone to understand, with no mathematical formulas or complicated tiebreakers; something which can be automated in a spreadsheet
Transparent -- Closely related to simple: everyone will know what the system is; teams will know their out-of-conference opponents before the official schedule of games is even released
Equitable -- A system which contributes to league parity over time. Generally stated, better teams should face tougher schedules. It should be difficult, by design, for one team to dominate the league for long stretches. I believe parity is not just desirable in the ISFL, but important for the long-term health of the league. Users on historically weaker teams need a reason to stay engaged with the league. Creating a system where any given team can go from league worst to championship contender within a few seasons would help to do that.
With all that said, I devised two possible systems in which a team's finish in the regular season standings would determine their out-of-conference opponents for the following season. You'll see which one I prefer.
System 1: The Obvious System
Conference 1st Place: top 4 teams from the opposing conference
2nd: 1, 2, 3, 5
3rd: 1, 2, 4, 6
4th: 1, 3, 5, 7
5th: 2, 4, 6, 7
6th: 3, 5, 6, 7
7th: bottom 4 teams
Based on the Season 44 final standings, here's what that would look like:
What's good about it: This is the simplest possible system, especially for the 1st- and 7th-place teams.
Why I don't like it: For lack of a better way of expressing it, I think this system works too well. The gap in difficulty between the 1st-place schedule and the 7th-place schedule is too great for my liking. There's still a place in the game for an element of "to be the best, beat the best." I think with this scheduling scheme you could see a lot of wild yo-yoing up and down the standings from year to year, based on the relative difficulty or softness of the out-of-conference schedule. Parity is desirable, but you can have too much of a good thing. Instead of challenging good teams and motivating bad ones, this system almost seems to punish success and reward failure.
First place and last place isn't the only spot where you have a strength of schedule gap. Using the sum of the opponents' seedings as a (very) rough strength of schedule metric (with lower being tougher) you get:
1: 1+2+3+4 = 10
2: 1+2+3+5 = 11
3: 1+2+4+6 = 13
4: 1+3+5+7 = 16
5: 2+4+6+7 = 19
6: 3+5+6+7 = 21
7: 4+5+6+7 = 22
The 1/2 and 6/7 relative strength of schedules are so small as to be almost meaningless, while 4 gets a substantially easier schedule than 3, and 5 gets a substantially easier schedule than 4. Again, success appears to be punished while failure is rewarded.
System 2: The Exciting System!
Conference 1st Place: 1, 2, 3, 5
2nd: 1, 2, 4, and 6
3rd: 1, 3, 4, and 7
4th: 2, 3, 5, and 6
5th: 1, 4, 5, and 7
6th: 2, 4, 6, and 7
7th: 3, 5, 6, and 7
Here's what this schedule would look like based on the final season standings:
Why I prefer this system: In short, I think it does a better job of encouraging competition.
The 1st-place schedule is slightly easier and the last-place schedule is slightly tougher compared to The Obvious System. The best team still faces the toughest schedule, and the worst team still gets the easiest, but the gap in relative strength of schedule feels much smaller. Notably, every team will face at least one playoff team from the opposing conference, which means that the worst teams still have to challenge themselves against tougher competition, and the best teams have to prove that they can win games they're expected to win.
Even more importantly in my opinion, The Exciting System maximizes the number of like-versus-like games. One quirk of the odd number of teams is that it's mathematically impossible for every team to play their exact counterpart. In The Obvious System, only the 1, 2, 6, and 7-seeds play each other. Here every team except 4th-place plays their counterpart in the opposing conference, and the 4-seeds play the two teams immediately above and below themselves. Compared to The Obvious System, The Exciting System features fewer overall games in which one team will be heavily favored.
Let's do that same strength of schedule exercise again:
1: 1+2+3+5 = 11
2: 1+2+4+6 = 13
3: 1+3+4+7 = 15
4: 2+3+5+6 = 16
5: 1+4+5+7 = 17
6: 2+4+6+7 = 19
7: 3+5+6+7 = 21
Again, the 1st-place schedule is slightly easier and the 7th-place schedule is slightly tougher. But in this scheme, the strength of schedule gap between 1/2 and 6/7 is the same as the gap between 2/3 and 5/6. The 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-place schedules are very close in difficulty, which in my opinion is appropriate for the tier of teams that are all fighting for the 3rd playoff spot in their respective conferences.
Overall it may not be quite as... obvious... as The Obvious System, but The Exciting System is still easily understandable, predictable, and automation-friendly, while being healthier and more balanced in terms of competition.
One possible objection to a seeding-based out-of-conference scheduling scheme is that it can't guarantee that every team plays every other team from their opposing conference at least once every other season. To this I offer two rebuttals.
In the first place, the odd number of teams introduces a complicating factor. You can't simply play "4-and-4" or "3-and-3" as you could if there were an even number of teams per conference, so you inevitably play one out-of-conference team two years in a row. How do you solve that? You would either have to create some kind of rivalry scheme in which every team has a designated counterpart that they play every year, or you could have to have a complex rotational system that plays out in 7-season cycles. The first option could take advantage of some natural cross-conference rivalries, notably between the expansion teams (HON/SAR and NYS/BER), but these would be exceptions proving the rule: rivalries work best, and are more interesting, when they emerge naturally. Trying to force a rivalry to happen doesn't work. Look to real-world college football for an example, where the manufactured and ludicrously-named "Civil ConFLiCT" between UConn and UCF never got off the ground and was mocked relentlessly from the moment it was introduced. Trying to force a rivalry to happen where there simply isn't one is just kind of annoying. And a 7-season rotation of out-of-conference games isn't quickly and easily predictable like standings-based scheduling, since you'd always have to remember where you were in the sequence, and it's also harder to automate.
Secondly, rotational out-of-conference scheduling is competitively unbalanced. You could easily have a scenario where a juggernaut team has the easiest out-of-conference schedule and a cellar-dweller has the toughest. Granted, that can still happen if a championship team decides to break up the band in the same season that the last-place team hits on all their draft picks, but standings-based scheduling still gives you the greatest likelihood of a balanced out-of-conference slate of games.
Now, what about Home versus Away games? Unlike the scheme to determine which teams you'll play, this is more challenging to explain simply, but there's still a system by which it can be automated. Actually it's probably easier to automate than it is to explain. Once again we're faced with a challenge from having an odd number of teams, because it becomes mathematically impossible to just alternate Home and Away. The best solution I could find was to alternate Home and Away games for every team except the 4-seed, who would follow a "H-@-@-H" or "@-H-H-@" pattern.
The simplest way to explain this scheme is to use one conference as a reference for the other. The most concise way I think I can state this: In odd-numbered seasons, the NSFC 1-seed will be at home against the ASFC 1-seed, and the NSFC 4-seed will be at home against their odd-seeded ASFC opponents (3-seed and 5-seed). All other games will alternate Home and Away in a grid pattern.
It's a lot easier to show than it is to explain in words. We'll use the Season 44 standings as our example again. Season 45 would be an odd-numbered season, so the out-of-conference schedule would look like this:
Difficult to explain, but easy to display and automate in a spreadsheet. As in, I was able to figure it out, it's that easy. Put in the season number and the previous season's standings, and the spreadsheet spits out the out-of-conference slate.
Under the system explained here, with just the season standings and a little bit of Excel work, any team could easily determine their out-of-conference opponents for the following season.
It's easy, it's transparent, and it's competitively balanced. I recommend it for consideration.
First, a clear statement of the broad goal --
Create a simple, transparent, and equitable system for out-of-conference scheduling.
Next, some definitions --
Simple -- Easy for anyone to understand, with no mathematical formulas or complicated tiebreakers; something which can be automated in a spreadsheet
Transparent -- Closely related to simple: everyone will know what the system is; teams will know their out-of-conference opponents before the official schedule of games is even released
Equitable -- A system which contributes to league parity over time. Generally stated, better teams should face tougher schedules. It should be difficult, by design, for one team to dominate the league for long stretches. I believe parity is not just desirable in the ISFL, but important for the long-term health of the league. Users on historically weaker teams need a reason to stay engaged with the league. Creating a system where any given team can go from league worst to championship contender within a few seasons would help to do that.
With all that said, I devised two possible systems in which a team's finish in the regular season standings would determine their out-of-conference opponents for the following season. You'll see which one I prefer.
System 1: The Obvious System
Conference 1st Place: top 4 teams from the opposing conference
2nd: 1, 2, 3, 5
3rd: 1, 2, 4, 6
4th: 1, 3, 5, 7
5th: 2, 4, 6, 7
6th: 3, 5, 6, 7
7th: bottom 4 teams
Based on the Season 44 final standings, here's what that would look like:
What's good about it: This is the simplest possible system, especially for the 1st- and 7th-place teams.
Why I don't like it: For lack of a better way of expressing it, I think this system works too well. The gap in difficulty between the 1st-place schedule and the 7th-place schedule is too great for my liking. There's still a place in the game for an element of "to be the best, beat the best." I think with this scheduling scheme you could see a lot of wild yo-yoing up and down the standings from year to year, based on the relative difficulty or softness of the out-of-conference schedule. Parity is desirable, but you can have too much of a good thing. Instead of challenging good teams and motivating bad ones, this system almost seems to punish success and reward failure.
First place and last place isn't the only spot where you have a strength of schedule gap. Using the sum of the opponents' seedings as a (very) rough strength of schedule metric (with lower being tougher) you get:
1: 1+2+3+4 = 10
2: 1+2+3+5 = 11
3: 1+2+4+6 = 13
4: 1+3+5+7 = 16
5: 2+4+6+7 = 19
6: 3+5+6+7 = 21
7: 4+5+6+7 = 22
The 1/2 and 6/7 relative strength of schedules are so small as to be almost meaningless, while 4 gets a substantially easier schedule than 3, and 5 gets a substantially easier schedule than 4. Again, success appears to be punished while failure is rewarded.
System 2: The Exciting System!
Conference 1st Place: 1, 2, 3, 5
2nd: 1, 2, 4, and 6
3rd: 1, 3, 4, and 7
4th: 2, 3, 5, and 6
5th: 1, 4, 5, and 7
6th: 2, 4, 6, and 7
7th: 3, 5, 6, and 7
Here's what this schedule would look like based on the final season standings:
Why I prefer this system: In short, I think it does a better job of encouraging competition.
The 1st-place schedule is slightly easier and the last-place schedule is slightly tougher compared to The Obvious System. The best team still faces the toughest schedule, and the worst team still gets the easiest, but the gap in relative strength of schedule feels much smaller. Notably, every team will face at least one playoff team from the opposing conference, which means that the worst teams still have to challenge themselves against tougher competition, and the best teams have to prove that they can win games they're expected to win.
Even more importantly in my opinion, The Exciting System maximizes the number of like-versus-like games. One quirk of the odd number of teams is that it's mathematically impossible for every team to play their exact counterpart. In The Obvious System, only the 1, 2, 6, and 7-seeds play each other. Here every team except 4th-place plays their counterpart in the opposing conference, and the 4-seeds play the two teams immediately above and below themselves. Compared to The Obvious System, The Exciting System features fewer overall games in which one team will be heavily favored.
Let's do that same strength of schedule exercise again:
1: 1+2+3+5 = 11
2: 1+2+4+6 = 13
3: 1+3+4+7 = 15
4: 2+3+5+6 = 16
5: 1+4+5+7 = 17
6: 2+4+6+7 = 19
7: 3+5+6+7 = 21
Again, the 1st-place schedule is slightly easier and the 7th-place schedule is slightly tougher. But in this scheme, the strength of schedule gap between 1/2 and 6/7 is the same as the gap between 2/3 and 5/6. The 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-place schedules are very close in difficulty, which in my opinion is appropriate for the tier of teams that are all fighting for the 3rd playoff spot in their respective conferences.
Overall it may not be quite as... obvious... as The Obvious System, but The Exciting System is still easily understandable, predictable, and automation-friendly, while being healthier and more balanced in terms of competition.
One possible objection to a seeding-based out-of-conference scheduling scheme is that it can't guarantee that every team plays every other team from their opposing conference at least once every other season. To this I offer two rebuttals.
In the first place, the odd number of teams introduces a complicating factor. You can't simply play "4-and-4" or "3-and-3" as you could if there were an even number of teams per conference, so you inevitably play one out-of-conference team two years in a row. How do you solve that? You would either have to create some kind of rivalry scheme in which every team has a designated counterpart that they play every year, or you could have to have a complex rotational system that plays out in 7-season cycles. The first option could take advantage of some natural cross-conference rivalries, notably between the expansion teams (HON/SAR and NYS/BER), but these would be exceptions proving the rule: rivalries work best, and are more interesting, when they emerge naturally. Trying to force a rivalry to happen doesn't work. Look to real-world college football for an example, where the manufactured and ludicrously-named "Civil ConFLiCT" between UConn and UCF never got off the ground and was mocked relentlessly from the moment it was introduced. Trying to force a rivalry to happen where there simply isn't one is just kind of annoying. And a 7-season rotation of out-of-conference games isn't quickly and easily predictable like standings-based scheduling, since you'd always have to remember where you were in the sequence, and it's also harder to automate.
Secondly, rotational out-of-conference scheduling is competitively unbalanced. You could easily have a scenario where a juggernaut team has the easiest out-of-conference schedule and a cellar-dweller has the toughest. Granted, that can still happen if a championship team decides to break up the band in the same season that the last-place team hits on all their draft picks, but standings-based scheduling still gives you the greatest likelihood of a balanced out-of-conference slate of games.
Now, what about Home versus Away games? Unlike the scheme to determine which teams you'll play, this is more challenging to explain simply, but there's still a system by which it can be automated. Actually it's probably easier to automate than it is to explain. Once again we're faced with a challenge from having an odd number of teams, because it becomes mathematically impossible to just alternate Home and Away. The best solution I could find was to alternate Home and Away games for every team except the 4-seed, who would follow a "H-@-@-H" or "@-H-H-@" pattern.
The simplest way to explain this scheme is to use one conference as a reference for the other. The most concise way I think I can state this: In odd-numbered seasons, the NSFC 1-seed will be at home against the ASFC 1-seed, and the NSFC 4-seed will be at home against their odd-seeded ASFC opponents (3-seed and 5-seed). All other games will alternate Home and Away in a grid pattern.
It's a lot easier to show than it is to explain in words. We'll use the Season 44 standings as our example again. Season 45 would be an odd-numbered season, so the out-of-conference schedule would look like this:
Difficult to explain, but easy to display and automate in a spreadsheet. As in, I was able to figure it out, it's that easy. Put in the season number and the previous season's standings, and the spreadsheet spits out the out-of-conference slate.
Under the system explained here, with just the season standings and a little bit of Excel work, any team could easily determine their out-of-conference opponents for the following season.
It's easy, it's transparent, and it's competitively balanced. I recommend it for consideration.