Welcome everyone to the score fantasy football podcast.

I'm your host, Justin Boone, the lead fantasy analyst at the score.

We are coming to you late in the week here, but I wanted to make sure we did a show in the NFL schedule being released this week. It takes a couple days for me to go over everything because it's not just the opponents. We've known those for a while. Now we have the roster changes that these defenses have gone through in free agency in the draft, Got some new coaching staffs on that side of the ball, and then you go a layer deeper and you factor in when teams are going to play specific opponents. You know, it was the tough part of their schedule early in the year, or maybe they could get off to a hot start because they got some easy matchups in the first month. And I find the first month to be the most predictive when we're talking about strength of schedule. So I tend to focus on that. I also did my annual article, the easiest and hardest early season schedules. So we're to talk about some of that today. You could read the full article if you want over at the score. I also put out my regular season strength of schedule matrix up on Friday. And that's for the entire year. I break it down position by position. There's a sortable table in there. It's ranked one to 32 for quarterback running back wide receiver tight end one being the easiest obviously, but it's all color coded. So green is easy yellow's average and then orange and red. Those are the tougher schedules and I have some notes about each position at the bottom but

there's just so much to factor in with this including like distance traveled for these teams and

warren sharp uh sharp football analysis he does a great job going over that every year you know

which teams have to cover the most distance during the season and things like rest between games

some teams have stretches where they're just going to get crushed because they have to play a bunch of games on short rest. Sometimes it's in really important weeks too, like how the league's doing those two Christmas games this year. I'm sure you heard about this already, but I'll go over it quick. Christmas falls on a Wednesday. So you have the chiefs, the Steelers, the Ravens, and the Texans.

They're all going to play in a short week. They play the Saturday before, which is week 16,

and then they play on the Wednesday right after during week 17, the fantasy championship week.

So that could impact their preparation for those games. It could put players at higher risk of injury.

Or even if we're

talking about teams having maybe locked up a playoff spot at that point in the year, maybe some

of those clubs are going to sit these guys or play them less snaps just to try to avoid injuries

right before the playoffs. So there is a lot to consider. I recommend you should go look at

Warren Sharpe's work over at Sharp Football Analysis.

Check out their schedule breakdown. It's not fantasy based. It's more general, but there's always

a lot of good information in there and you can use that for fantasy. I'm going to share some of my

schedule takeaways today. We'll talk about the early season schedules. I'll go over my thoughts

after doing that big strength to schedule matrix for 2024.

But we can start with the early season stuff because like I said, I think that's

the most valuable thing in all the schedule news.

And I weight that a little bit heavier in the matrix versus the late season games.

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