Your team's 2022 playoff outlook

ADPs for all 500 11-man Teams

Jul 21, 2022

Hi All!

Welcome back to Goosepoop, newsletter #30!

In today’s post, we will be reviewing the playoff outlooks for all 500 11-man teams in the State of Michigan.

To do this, we will be looking at one specific metric: Average Division Played (ADP). You may have seen some of our recent posts on social media regarding ADP - this post is really a follow-up to those. If you haven’t seen those yet, I highly suggest you head on over to one of our accounts (linking below) to check things out.

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DRUM ROLL PLEASE ..... Now presenting: the D2 football teams playing the largest opponents this year All else equal, these are the schools MOST LIKELY to make the playoffs in 2022

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How to Assess Your Team’s Playoff Chances

As a brief refresher, let’s review the new playoff point formula that went into effect last season.

If you remember, there are three variables to the new formula:

Your team’s wins & losses,
Your team’s opponent’s wins & losses, and
The division of your opponent.

For each of these variables, your playoff points increase if there is ‘more’: if you win more, your opponents win more, and you play larger division opponents, that increases your odds of making the playoffs. Inversely, if you win less, your opponents win less, and you play smaller division opponents, that decreases your odds of making the playoffs.

To get a true sense for every team’s playoff odds, then, we have to model each of these three variables.

However, doing this for #1 and #2 is quite difficult: because we are more than 30 days out from the start of the season, and no games have been played, we don’t have good way of modeling an opponent’s projected wins and losses.

So, we will resort to modeling just #3: almost all teams have finalized their 2022 schedules, so this variable is indeed observable.

Average Division Played: What It Means

Variable #3 is best summarized by the Average Division Played metric (ADP). ADP is the average division of each team’s 9 opponents.

By comparing the ADPs of teams within each division, you can get a sense for how high a bar teams have to clear to make the playoffs: the higher a team’s ADP, the more they will benefit in the playoff point calculation and the easier time they will have making the playoffs.

For instance, in 2021, Flint Powers made the playoffs despite posting a record of only 3-6. This is because their schedule had an ADP of 2.1, which was far higher than the division average of 5.2. This gap in ADP allowed them to jump over other teams with more wins but lower ADPs.

One of Flint Powers opponents were one of the teams that was jumped over: Flint Hamady, despite posting a much better 2021 record of 6-3, actually missed the playoffs. What was their ADP? 5.7, a number below the division average.

In summary, your team’s ADP creates the bar it has to clear for making the playoffs: if you have a high ADP, you need less wins to make the playoffs. If you have a low ADP, you need more wins to make the playoffs.

With this overview out of the way, let’s get into the numbers……….

Division 8 ADPs

Median ADP: 7.0

Top Half of ADPs (Better Playoff Chances):