NFL Scheduling

The NFL released the 2010 schedule on Tuesday. The league has become so popular that this was actually something of an event. It was a talker for sports radio as people combed through each team's schedule to figure out who had advantages and who got screwed. Each year this discussion brings about one incredibly ignorant criticism: bad teams end up with harder schedules than good teams.
The first thing you need to understand is that the difficulty of a schedule is determined by adding up the wins and losses of the opponents from the previous year. For instance this year the Vikings will play teams that had a combined record of 129-127, which is a pretty average difficulty. The Lions, who were one of the worst teams in the league play teams that went 130-126. (Not much disparity there but in the AFC South, Houston's difficulty was 140-116 while Indianapolis was 132-124).
So how do they figure out who a team will play each year? Let me use the local division (NFC North) to illustrate this. Their final standings looked like this:

Minnesota 12-4
Green Bay 11-5
Chicago 7-9
Detroit 2-14

Each team plays every other team in the division twice (home and away). That means that the Vikings divisional difficulty of 40-56 while Detroit has a divisional difficulty of 60-36. That's a 20 game swing right there. (Green Bay is at 42-54 and Chicago is at 50-46.)
Every team in each division also plays four games against another division in the same conference. This year the NFC North plays against the NFC East. This rotates so that each pair comes up once every three years. They also play each team from an AFC division (this year the AFC East). This rotates so that each interdivision plays once per four years. All teams play each of these eight teams, combined difficulty 66-62.
All fourteen of these games are preset. Each team can count on them for every future year. Barring realignment, you can forecast all of these opponents for as far out as you want. This exact combo will take place again in 2022.
There are only two games that really float from year to year. Each team plays the same place team on each of the other two divisions. So the Vikings, having finished in first place will play the winners of the NFC South and West (Saints and Cardinals 23-9). The Lions will play the last place teams (Bucs and Rams 4-28). That gives up most of the 20 game swing that I mentioned earlier.
So why do the Lions have a harder schedule than the Vikings? It's simple really. The Vikings get to play against the miserable record of the Lions while the poor Lions have to play against the very good record of the Vikes.
It's really not that tough and anyone who hosts a sports talk show on the radio should know this.