Sports After Dark

We know how much the Americans love their statistics in sports, so much so that they’ve invented quite a few of them. While watching an NFL game this week, I got an idea to apply one of their statistics, strength of schedule, to the Air New Zealand Cup and see what happened.

Basically this statistic measures how tough your opponents are, showing you who has been beating tough opposition and who has been beating up on the minnows.

For example, in week 5 of the Air New Zealand Cup Wellington beat Bay of Plenty by 48-12 but going into that game, both teams had won all four previous games and were sitting first and second on the table. Surely there isn’t a 36 point difference between first and second right?

Well there’s not. According to their strength of schedule statistic going into that game, Wellington’s schedule was eight points higher that Bay of Plenty’s, 51 to 43, meaning that Wellington had racked up four wins against much better teams that Bay of Plenty.

Here’s the end of season figures:

Interesting to note that some of the top teams had some of the easiest schedules, which is partly caused by the fact that they didn’t play themselves and partly because the two teams with the best records, Wellington and Canterbury, didn’t play each other in the round robin.

While these numbers are technically percentages, it’s best to regard them simply as numbers and note that Hawke’s Bay finished third on the table despite having the fourth toughest schedule, while Waikato finished sixth with the second easiest schedule.

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• All Blacks Squad Named
• World Cup semi finalists almost decided

The An interesting statistic by Hamish McBrearty, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.