Schedule strengths for USTA League Nationals - Should they be more even? They aren't as it stands

The USTA is rolling out a brand new format for USTA League Nationals this year, and I've written about the pros and cons of it, and subsequently have been doing a bunch of simulations to see how things would play out.

Something that has become clear is that with the new flightless random round-robin, the schedule strengths for each team can vary pretty wildly.  Using my ratings and calculating the average of the top-10 players for each team, the range can be pretty large.  Here are some examples from the 18 & Over events:

• 3.5 women - 3.43 to 3.69 (0.26)
• 3.5 men - 3.46 to 3.70 (0.24)
• 4.0 women - 3.84 to 4.04 (0.20)
• 4.0 men - 3.95 to 4.14 (0.19)

We see some pretty large ranges.  Even taking into account that my ratings are not a perfect predictor of results (but they've done pretty well), it appears some teams are clearly better than others.

These large ranges of top-10 averages coupled with a random round-robin format can lead to dramatically different schedule strengths too.  I'm calculating a schedule strength as the average of the top-10 averages for the teams scheduled to play.  Here are those ranges:

• 3.5 women - 3.51 to 3.63 (0.12)
• 3.5 men - 3.50 to 3.63 (0.13)
• 4.0 women - 3.89 to 4.00 (0.11)
• 4.0 men - 3.97 to 4.07 (0.10)

These are smaller than the ranges for the team strengths as you would expect, but are still pretty broad.  In some cases strong teams have tough schedules, but the "random" has worked and they often have easier schedules too.  Correspondingly, lower rated teams sometimes have easier schedules, but often tougher ones.

If you believe in random and luck of the draw, what has been done clearly provides that, but is that what is most fair or equitable?  Should some effort be made to have more balanced schedules so strong teams with easy schedules aren't virtually guaranteed to advance, and weaker teams with strong schedules are almost destined not to?

If you were to vote for something more balanced, I think it could be done pretty easily.

I've already written about one way to do the random round-robin by laying out the teams 1-17 and then having each team play the 2 teams ahead/behind them in the list, and if you just seed the teams at specific spots as you place them into the list, you can get more equitable schedule strengths.

For example, the 3.5 women using a standard placement I've come up with results in a schedule strength range of 3.52 to 3.60, just 0.08 vs the 0.12 the current schedule results in.  I didn't do this for each event, but I'd expect a similar shrinking of the gap for the others.

A drop of 30-40% is a big improvement, but we can do better.

If instead I simulate a bunch of different schedules looking for the most equitable (smallest gap between hardest/easiest), here is what we could do:

• 3.5 women - 3.54 to 3.57 (0.03)
• 3.5 men - 3.57 to 3.60 (0.03)
• 4.0 women - 3.95 to 3.97 (0.02)
• 4.0 men - 4.02 to 4.04 (0.02)

Now this is a real improvement, it really makes the schedules more equitable and should, in theory at least, put each team on equal footing giving resulting in even closer competition.

You might ask, how would you seed the teams?  Well, if I can calculate top-10 averages for each team and do it, the USTA with the actual dynamic ratings for all the players certainly could too.

Would this really be better than the random round-robin they've done?  We'll never be able to say for sure as we can't have the actual matches played both ways, but if we see some really lopsided results at Nationals, we'll probably know some strong teams got easy schedules and weak teams got tough schedules, and I'm certain what I've outlined would address that.

Will this happen?   I doubt it.  But now that I've written about it it is out there and they could elect to in the future.

What do you think?