Richard – That’s very true. The reason I made the rant was because I see lots of people talk about “strength of schedule”, but lots of people have different ideas about what that means. When using the term of strength of schedule it absolutely should include wins and losses. However, some people don’t want to talk about losses. In those cases it’s still possible to discuss a number, a stat, etc., but it becomes more of a “big game hunter” stat, or a “high score” stat or whatever.

Remember that what I’m after here is for people to be discussing the same thing. I’m not going to walk into a discussion between one person using option 2 and one person using option 3 and tell them both to use option 1. What I want to have happen is for those two people to realize they are discussing *DIFFERENT* things. Then they will hopefully take some time to discuss option 2, and then some time on option 3. They might even use others, but to watch people argue for 15 pages across a thread when neither is talking about the same thing is very frustrating for me.

As an example from above, someone talking about Fedor’s strength of schedule should realize he has a fair amount of weaker fights and thusly his overall strength of schedule isn’t as strong. If they instead want to discuss hardest wins or another stat, then things can be very different.

An additional benefit of looking at the above is to realize how some systems become very flawed. Most people talking about “strength of schedule” aren’t looking for guys with 1 or 2 fights and they aren’t looking for fighters that have never won a fight in their entire career.

Cases like that lead to sub-stats, increased parameters, etc. Again, I won’t say which is “right” because that depends on the situation. However, it is very wrong to argue with someone when you aren’t even discussing the same thing. Someone can yell until they are blue in the face about how great Peterson is, but if I’m talking about european football the discussing isn’t going anywhere until we get on the same page. We can ultimately still disagree, but we should at least be using the same criteria to reach those conclusions. *shrugs*

Much like with any sport I think different people will tend to favor different stats. Some like total rushing yards, some like all-purpose yards, some like yards per carry, etc.

This can quickly remove any chance at reasonable debate/discussion when one person is talking about “strength of schedule” in the classic sense (method 1), but the other person is talking more about “big game hunting” as I called it or, “most impressive victory tally” as you put it. My aim isn’t to say “this number is right”, but rather an attempt at getting both sides to recognize the other person’s method for arriving at that number. It is very possible for both people to be correct, but simply to be talking about different things. It’s also possible someone is simply wrong, but it’s easier to explain that if you understand exactly what they are talking about.

When talking specifically about method 1, a min number of fights is very useful as it prevents a fighter having only a few fights and achieving an incredibly high strength of schedule. This is why the list builder on the main site allows setting a minimum number of fights.

Method 1, with a minimum of 10 fights should paint a pretty accurate picture of a big name fighter who’s stepped up the most.