How Easy is the Chargers Schedule?

The Los Angeles Chargers schedule leaks will populate your timelines, but we already know who their opponents will be. How easy is their schedule, really?

Not much in the way of Los Angeles Chargers news has emerged from the schedule leaks that are spreading across the NFL. We’ll see the official schedule release later tonight, but we already know who the Chargers are going to play — along with every other team.

For those who want to know when and where the Chargers will play their pre-determined opponents, keep an eye on our tracker.

Now that we know that the Chargers will not be playing in an international game, we don’t have to do any difficult adjustments for that kind of travel to a neutral field to think about their path forward.

While Los Angeles is largely regarded as a rebuilding team with a new head coach and some work to do throughout their roster, an easy enough schedule could give them a path to the playoffs that could secure or retain free agents in 2025 and give them a headstart on instilling a new team culture.

Also, it’s nice to see your team win games.

The first approach to calculating strength of schedule is to use the prior year’s win percentage. That’s the approach the NFL took when they tweeted it out.

By this measure, the Chargers have the fifth-easiest strength of schedule.

But win percentage has been the least reliable method that people commonly use to estimate next year’s team strength. After all, the Houston Texans went 3-13-1 in 2022 before hiring DeMeco Ryans and drafting C.J. Stroud, setting up a 10-7 season and a playoff appearance.

An even more predictable and appropriate example would be the 2022 Minnesota Vikings, whose 13-4 record obscured a team reliant on fluky victories and comeback wins. In 2023, that team landed near their expected win total of seven, finishing 7-10.

Point differential hews a lot closer to real team quality, and from that perspective the Chargers schedule is only slightly harder, ranking as the sixth-easiest.

But we should probably account for the fact that those teams played easy or difficult schedules in 2023 that impacted their record. We can use something called Simple Rating System that adjusted point differential by strength of schedule (which keeps making adjustments after every iteration until the adjustment is zero). By that metric, the Chargers have, again, a slightly more difficult schedule with the eighth-easiest outlook.

Of course, that’s not fair either. The Chargers have the Cincinnati Bengals, who played much of the season without their starting quarterback. It’s not reasonable to expect that they’ll be up against Jake Browning this year. The Arizona Cardinals are in the same boat, having played Joshua Dobbs for a good chunk of the year.

And the Atlanta Falcons, New England Patriots and Denver Broncos will be playing with a completely new starting quarterback this year. Looking at last year’s Falcons and trying to project this year’s outcome would be folly.

So a more appropriate metric might be one that accounts for the changing expectations of these teams. There is no fool-proof way to do this, but the most consistent might be by using opponent win expectations by the sportsbooks.

Warren Sharp at Sharp Football Analysis did just that, even taking the extra step to incorporate the lines into an implied win total.

By this measure, the Chargers have the second-easiest schedule — much better than the eighth-easiest suggested by adjusted point differential method.

This gets us pretty close. Last year, Sharp’s calculations suggested that the Chargers would have the sixth-most difficult schedule. By adjusted point differential, they had the eighth-most difficult schedule.

The five easiest schedules predicted by this method in 2023 largely ended up with easy schedules, with the Saints and Falcons ultimately landing in the top five by the end of the season. The Colts had a slightly easier-than-average schedule and the 49ers had a slightly more difficult-than-average schedule. Only the Panthers were predicted to have an easy slate of opponents before finding themselves near the top of the difficulty rankings.

But no system is perfect. The five most difficult schedules were supposed to all belong to AFC teams — the Patriots, Bills, Dolphins, Chiefs and Raiders. The Bills and Dolphins ended up with two of the five easiest schedules along with the Saints and Falcons, while the Raiders and Chiefs finished just outside of the top five in ease-of-opponent.

The Patriots, it turned out, just had an average schedule.

Ultimately, it’s meaningless. Remember that when the schedule officially drops later tonight.