The Raiders are saddled with the hardest schedule any team has seen in five years. Denver, San Diego and Kansas City all made the playoffs last year. They’ve got six games against those teams. And the division pairs up against the NFC West this season, so Oakland also will play Seattle, San Francisco and Arizona – all of those teams won 10-plus games last year.
Toss in a game against the Patriots, and that’s an awfully tough looking slate for Oakland.
Overall, it totals up to a win-loss record of 148-108 for those opponents, which projects to be the hardest schedule anyone has played since 2009 (the last time two dominant divisions were thrown together).
Denver is right behind, with a schedule reading at 146-110.
Such figures, of course, are soft. They are based on what teams did LAST YEAR, and teams change. Who would have thunk, for example, that the Texans would bumble and stumble to 2-14 last season? They projected to be a tough, division winner entering last year but ended up being an asset.
It will be a the same this year. Some of those supposedly tough games will end up being easy. Maybe Peyton Manning gets hurt in August or Kansas City implodes.
But on average, when you project to play a really tough schedule, it usually means you’re playing at least a hard schedule.
In the last 20 years, 14 times teams have entered seasons scheduled to play teams that collectively won at least 145 games the year before. I’ve got them listed below. For all 14 schedules, the opposing teams went on to finish with a collective winning record. So all schedules were at least harder than .500.
Of the 14, three were pretty close to .500. So they were average-type schedules. This is probably the best Oakland can hope for.
Of the 14, four finished at least 20 games over .500. That’s setting aside the pollutant of said team itself. That is, for the Raiders this year, their opponents will play 256 games – 16 against Oakland, and 240 against other teams. Looking at just those 240, four of the schedules examined finished over 20 games in the red (130-110 or worse).
So those are definitely extremely difficult schedules – one where you would expect offensive numbers of said team to be affected.
Another four schedules were at least 10 games over .500 – tough, but not crushingly difficult.
These are the schedules. I’m showing them not based on their preseason expectation (all graded out with win-loss records of at least 145-111) but how they turned out (looking at the 240 resulting games).
| PROJECTED HARDEST SCHEDULES SINCE 1993 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Team | Win | Loss | Tie | Pct. |
| 2009 | Miami | 134 | 106 | 0 | .558 |
| 1999 | Oakland | 132 | 108 | 0 | .550 |
| 2008 | Pittsburgh | 129 | 108 | 3 | .544 |
| 2009 | Carolina | 130 | 110 | 0 | .542 |
| 2009 | Tampa Bay | 129 | 111 | 0 | .538 |
| 1996 | Green Bay | 126 | 114 | 0 | .525 |
| 2009 | New England | 126 | 114 | 0 | .525 |
| 2009 | NY Jets | 125 | 115 | 0 | .521 |
| 2000 | Buffalo | 124 | 116 | 0 | .517 |
| 2008 | Indianapolis | 123 | 116 | 1 | .515 |
| 2001 | Minnesota | 123 | 117 | 0 | .513 |
| 2009 | Buffalo | 122 | 118 | 0 | .508 |
| 2009 | Atlanta | 122 | 118 | 0 | .508 |
| 2000 | Miami | 121 | 119 | 0 | .504 |
—Ian Allan