Last month, I wrote about how the short, seven-game schedules in each stage could lead to significant strength-of-schedule imbalances. Now that the official schedules are out – and updated on the site! – I’ve crunched some numbers to determine that, yes, there are some pretty wild swings that could impact stage playoff participants – and even help at least one expansion team realize some early success.

To determine just how great the differences are, I used a method that other sports, particularly the NFL, tend to use at the start of a season. It’s usually pretty simple: Just average out the winning percentages of a team’s opponents from last year and apply it to this year’s schedule. That doesn’t always paint the most accurate picture of a team’s strength of schedule, especially when you take player movement, injuries, and playing time into account, but it’s at least something.

Things are a little more complex when you add expansion teams to the mix. They didn’t have a record last year, so I went with a few assumptions. Expansion teams will probably be worse, overall, than established teams, since all the best players were probably already signed. Each expansion team will play 10 games against other expansion teams and 18 games against other teams. I decided to give them a 5-5 record against the other expansion teams (which is how they’ll have to average out) and 4-14 in their other games. That gives them an overall record of 9-19, or .321.

Then, to balance things out and make sure the league was .500 as a whole, I applied the following trick: .321 is .179 below .500. Multiply .179 by eight expansion teams and you get 1.432. Divide that by the 12 non-expansion teams and you get .119, and I added that to the record of each non-expansion team, which assumes that, had played expansion teams in the first season, they’d have won about 11.9% more games. That gave me a league that came to .500 overall. (Technically, it was .4998 after rounding, but I’ll take it!)

The results are compiled in two charts below. The darker the green, the easier the schedule, and the darker the red, the harder the schedule. First, here’s how each team’s opposing difficulty stacks up on a per-stage basis (click to enlarge):

And here are the individual team/stage combinations, ranked from hardest to easiest:

The toughest stage schedule belongs to the Atlanta Reign in Stage 2. They’ll face two expansion teams – Guangzhou and Washington – but their other five matchups will be against playoff teams from last year, including two against New York.

On the flip side, the Los Angeles Valiant have an easy road in Stage 3. They’ll face London, but the rest of their schedule is two games against Shanghai and four against expansion teams. If the Valiant don’t make the stage playoffs, there will be some explaining to do.

Oddly enough, the second-toughest and second-easiest stage schedules both belong to Chengdu. In Stage 1, the Hunters draw Seoul, Florida, Shanghai, and four expansion teams. I don’t know how good their roster is, but if they’re just mildly decent, a 5-2 or 6-1 record and a high playoff seed right out of the gate could be theirs for the taking.

I feel a little bad for the Washington Justice. They have a harder-than-average schedule for each of the first three stages, and then a relatively easy one in Stage 4 – but there are no playoffs in that stage.

As expected, the overall season strength-of-schedule difficulty is fairly even across the board. The team with the easiest schedule is the L.A. Valiant (.464), while the team with the toughest road is the Florida Mayhem (.530).

As I mentioned at the top, using last season’s records to try and determine the current season’s schedule difficulty, especially where expansion teams are involved, is a very inexact science. Still, it will be interesting to come back to this post at the end of the season to see how well the “easy” schedules matched up with how teams scored playoff berths in each stage.