Schedule Fairness Analysis

Bottom Line

Main Takeaways

• In 2023 and 2024, teams scored clearly above their own average when facing bottom-five finishers and below their own average when facing top-five finishers.
• 2025 was different: the week-level signal was basically flat league-wide, but the top three finishers still had the easiest overall played schedules.
• The strongest evidence for a fairness problem is not one single missed matchup. It is the season-long spread in opponent strength created by an unbalanced schedule.
• A structured division format helps most when it guarantees a shared core schedule inside each division. It does not automatically solve fairness if the divisions themselves are built poorly.

2025 Case Study

Top 4 Breakdown

Interpretation

What That Means

The 2023 and 2024 seasons both show the same directional pattern: teams tended to post stronger-than-normal point weeks against lower-finishing opponents. That means opponent quality mattered in the weekly points race. In 2025 that relationship was not visible at the week level, but the final top three teams still benefited from easier overall schedules.

Said differently: even when a single missed matchup does not explain the standings, schedule imbalance can still matter across the whole season by shifting the average difficulty of the opponents a team actually faced.

Missed Strong Teams

Avoiding The Top 4

Using each season's actual top 4 as the stronger teams, and only counting opponents from weeks that were actually played, the pattern across 2023-2025 is that teams that missed more top-4 opponents tended to finish higher.

Year by year, the effect gets stronger. In 2023, teams that missed a top-4 opponent finished 0.53 places better on average. In 2024, that gap grew to 2.15 places. In 2025, the gap was much smaller at 0.55 places.

So the cleanest statement is not that 2025 proved the point by itself. It is that across the full 2023-2025 sample, teams that avoided more top-4 opponents generally finished a little better, with 2024 providing the strongest single-year example.

Blowout Check

Biggest Beatings And Top-Finisher Correlation

To test whether dominant weekly wins were connected to the teams that finished at the top, I flagged each season's top 10 percent of scoring margins as "major beatings." That cutoff was 7.0 points in 2023, 10.0 in 2024, and 9.0 in 2025.

The strongest 2025 correlation is not that every top finisher piled up huge wins. It is that the top teams almost never got buried. John Angeletti Jr. / Jeff Angeletti and PJ Degnan / Casey Digirolamo each posted two major beatings, while Bill Johnson / Bryce Ireland and Jody Gwin / Kane Desmond reached the top four without any major beatings either for or against them.

That makes blowouts more of a stability signal than a full explanation. The top teams did not all dominate the weakest opponents, but they also avoided the large negative swings that show up more often in the middle and bottom of the standings.

Repeat Blowouts

Were The Same Teams Taking The Major Beatings?

On the delivery side, PJ Degnan / Casey Digirolamo recorded the most major wins across the three-year sample with six, and did it in all three seasons.

Top Finishers

Who The Top Teams Missed

Higher missed-opponent average means the team skipped weaker finishers. Lower means it skipped stronger finishers.

Schedule Spread

How Uneven Was The Actual Schedule?

Schedule spread is the gap between the easiest and hardest played schedules, measured by opponents’ final standings ranks. Bigger spread means a wider fairness gap across the field.

Exploratory

What About A Division Structure?

The table below is exploratory only. It is not a proposed final schedule. It uses standings-seeded divisions and then forces a full in-division round robin before filling the remaining weeks. This is useful because it shows an important truth: structure alone is not enough. If divisions are seeded or built poorly, a division system can actually make schedule inequality worse.

The takeaway is not that divisions are bad. The takeaway is that divisions need a fairness rule behind them. If the goal is fair qualification, the best argument is this: make teams compete primarily against a smaller group where everyone shares the same core opponents. That removes a lot of the current “you happened to miss these two teams” noise inside the race that actually matters.

Recommendation

Best Case For A Structured Division Layout

• Guarantee that every team plays every team in its division at least once.
• Use division standings for qualification, so direct competitors share the same core schedule.
• Treat cross-division weeks as bonus or balancing weeks rather than the main qualification base.
• If divisions are used, avoid creating them from pure strength seeding alone. That can create new imbalance instead of solving the old one.
• If the committee wants one full-league championship, reconnect the divisions in playoffs or interleague weeks after the regular-season qualification race is settled.

Based on these three years, the strongest defensible statement is: the current unbalanced format creates real schedule-strength variance, and a structured division schedule would make the qualification race fairer if the division schedule itself is shared evenly.