How the NFL Schedule is Made

for him. Maybe he's playing on Monday night. Or you can possibly purchase those hotel rooms and airline tickets to one of those international games that are being played this season. Yeah, I'd love to go to one of those. I'm like yeah. And today on NFL Explained, we are taking a look at how the NFL schedule is created. Now, by looking at the schedule, it might seem like it's the simplest place in teams into home and away games. It's why

more complicated. In reality, it's like a giant Rubik's cube. There are two hundred and seventy two games spread out over eighteen weeks. Let that digest for just a moment, two hundred and seventy two games, not just your team. There's a lot of moving parts here, plus the international games, scheduling conflicts for the stadiums because you know that there's always a cool concert that you gotta check out in your local city, and of course making sure that the

key matchups make it into primetime. So trying to understand how the NFL schedule is created is like trying to read a foreign language and almost impossible for me to try to explain. Trust me, it is really complicated. So this week on NFL Explain how the schedule is created, we're listening to the experts who can do it way more eloquently than I can, on how they actually put

together the full eighteen week NFL scheduled. And if you actually like to see the video that accompanies the audio clips that you're about to hear, all you have to do just head over to the NFL Explained YouTube channel and search for how the NFL schedule is created. Trust me, it is awesome to see it visually, as well as a bonus to fill in any questions that actually aren't

answered from the clips that were picking. I actually had a chance to sit down with Mike North, and trust me, the dude is awesome to give us all the three here. It's on how they actually try to build the most optimal schedule. Trust me, I know I keep saying it's it's it's so much harder than you could possibly even fathom. But the NFL schedule team is basically made up of people that you want on your team, Howard Kats, Mike North,

Charlotte Carry, Annie Bows, Blake Jones, and Nick Cooney. And they get right to work as soon as the clock hit zero on the NFL regular season to come up with the next season schedule to showcase the league's best matchups and talent every single week. When the regular season ended on January three, you know, Monday, January four, we were right on the software loading in what we now knew to be the two seventy two matchups one and the matchups are set by a combination of rotation and

previous years standings. The NFL has thirty two teams, and we are divided into two conferences of sixteen teams each, and within each conference we've got four divisions of four teams each. So now, of course, the seventeen games you're gonna have every team plays their three division opponents each home and away, so that's six games that every team in that division will play another division in their own conference to home tow away, so that's four more games.

That's ten total. And then they'll play a division in the other conference in its entirety to home tow away,

so that's fourteen total. Now there's two more in your conference by standings, the first place team in the East will play the first place team in the South, and the West, the second place will play the two seconds, the third will play the two thirds, so that's two more games for sixteen, and now in an expanded season, will do the same in the other conference, will play an interconference game against a division that you are not playing already this year, that you didn't play last year,

that you're not playing next year, and that will be a standing space game. This is now even more places to put each of those games, and they can go now in any one a seventeen weeks. So the solution space was already infinite, and we didn't just double or triple or quadruple the size of it exponentially increase the size of it. We always liken this to try and to find the best grain of sand on the beach. We're no longer just looking on a beach. We're now

looking in the Sahara Desert. It is truly, truly infinite. We always knew that a seventeen game season was on the horizon. Possibly two hundred and fifty six games over seventeen weeks, while already all but impossible, it was a lot easier than two D seventy two games over eighteen weeks. Look. I think that when you go from two hundred fifty six games to two D seventy two games, it feels like it's sixteen more games. How much harder could it be?

But when you think about it mathematically in the search space, sixteen additional games and a two D seventy two game grid just made it exponentially bigger. I can't even quantify the numbers. The easiest way to think about it I found when I explained it to people is if Howard Katz or Roger Goodell says to us, here's ten games that I think should be on Sunday night football, there's three point six million ways just to lay out those

ten Sunday night football games. I'm gonna let that sink in for a second, three point six million possibilities just because Commissioner Goodell might want ten games there. I mean, if that gives you some context on the moving parts. Kind of crazy, right, It is not easy, But the daunting task of creating the NFL schedule didn't actually always have computers or coded formulas to make their job easier. It was actually done by hand on a corkboard by

the late Valel Pinchback. Now, Val, who's actually in the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, would sit for hours in his office trying to create the perfect NFL schedule by hand, no computers. But what you can't see by listening to this next clip is the board value used to work with. It's a simple, old fashioned corkboard. You got the color coded tabs, the pushpins. The team actually might use Excel spreadsheets now, but the board is still around and hangs

on the wall in the war room. And of course it does, right. It's a memento and it just looks really cool. Now. The team where it gathers to solve NFL schedule, that's where the actual board still hangs. That room, which is aptly called the vale a Pinchbeck Jr. Room, it's just cool. Like I highly recommend just checking out the video so you can see just how daunting this task is. And you see all the push pins and

the tabs. It's pretty crazy. But for a little more context, Mike North actually starts us off by taking us through the history of how the schedule was created with Valve up until today, where the team actually uses computers to create the schedule. Technology. Oh, I love it. It has made the process somewhat easier. Even though it might be computer driven, it still takes thousands of computers running algorithms

to create the best possible schedule. I feel like Cynthia Freeland should be involved in this, But the point is Mike North and his team they got a lot of work to do. Val is kind of the legendary schedule maker of the NFL for you know, many many years and created the schedule during that time when the NFL grew to prominence. If I'm proud of something that's being part of the NFL when it gone went from sort of a mom and pop thing in the sixties to

a kind of big business it is today. Valve you know, on you know, sheer force of mental will and intuition built a schedule by hand, and they were lucky to complete one and felt great to complete one that was legal and played all the games and got Network TV done. And we churned through hundreds every day. And so Val used to build the schedule with a board just like this. He would sit here and all these tags would be hanging down here at the bottom of the board, and

it would be a blank piece of paper. It would be carte blanche Christmas morning. You could do anything you wanted, and we would start hanging these tags up one at a time. Every game that you like, you put one of these colored pins in. These are for our national television partners. So if you like this game, this green pin goes in the Atlanta Carolina game, and that's on

Sunday Night Football in Week three. Now, if anybody came by this board and gave it a whack, all the other tags could fall off, but not that Atlanta Carolina game on Sunday Night Football and Week three, that's the one that we want in that week, and all the others really just needed to find a home. As we built the schedule by hand, every single one of these tags that moved every single one of these pins that moved caused a ripple effect that you couldn't even begin

to consider. While you were doing this, one dag at a time, one game at a time. And Val was a savant. Val could sit and stare at this board for hours on end, and he would sit here and he would crack open pistachios and he would eat the pistachios and stare at the board, and he put the shells on his belly. And so after about twenty minutes he'd have a whole bunch of empty shells and he'd gets struck by inspiration. He'd stand up, dumped the shells

into the garbage. Move this tag here, move that tag there, move that tag there, and move that tag there. It was amazing to watch. It's inconceivable to think that we could even do this thing by hand right now. So we're very fortunate to have a really robust piece of software that essentially looks just like this. When we talk about what our software prints out, it prints out this board, the reds and blues for CBS and Fox, the greens

and yellows for NBC and ESPN. We essentially built a piece of software to mirror the process that value used to go through when he sat here with his pistachio nuts and stared at it. So this looks a lot like that. It's the same colors, it's the same grid, it's the same columns in the same rows. This piece of software was built by a company out of Western

Canada called Optimal Planning Solutions. So we write the rules in the software, and then the software from Optimal Planning uses an optimizer called Grobi optimization, which takes all the rules and really tries to figure out, Okay, if there's an infinite solution space, and these are all the rules

I have to follow, where do I even start. When we asked the computer to go off and search through the infinite space, not only does it need to know which of these games are eligible for which of these time slots, and certainly which of these stadiums are not available for various conflicts, and what are our travel considerations and all the stuff that we're asking it to consider

in that consideration list is competitive fairness. So the way we do that is with a negative based scoring system, where we put a penalty on all the things we don't want to see. That's both team wise and television wise, So, for instance, three game road trips and road after road mondays and early buys, and to a way to start and too a way to finish, and all the things that we know the coaches and general managers don't like.

If I had a three game road trip last year, then the penalty for me having a three game road trip again this year should be significantly higher than for someone else who probably hasn't had a three game road trips since two thousand and three. We're also writing rules about a strong Sunday night football schedule, a strong Monday

night football schedule, a strong Thursday night football schedule. If we can't deliver all those things that our network partners are looking for, that should bring a penalty as well. The lower the score, hopefully, the less disappointed the clubs

and the television partners are going to be. The ability for our software can't be underestimated in the sense that being able to access hundreds, if not thousands, of machines on a daily, nightly hourly basis, and and just the computing power that's involved in there allows us to turn around scenarios and changes how we are able to think bigger, analyze more, but also reactive things. We can go in and we can look at it. These are four separate clusters.

There's between two hundred and three hundred computers in each one of these clusters, and each one of these clusters is looking on a slightly different part of the beach. This one might have green Bay, Kansas City on Sunday Night Football in week seven. This one might have green Bay, Kansas City on Sunday Night football. And week nine, this one might not have green Bay, Kansas City on Sunday Night football at all. It might be on Monday Night football.

And this one might have green Bay, Kansas City as a Fox doubleheader. So it will run on this one seed schedule, that one computer for as long as it takes. And so every single day we have thousands of computers, all with slightly different seed schedules, all searching through this infinite space trying to find a better score. They can do a lot of aim high steering for us that we could never do when we were building this schedule by hand. All right, So I get it, your head

is spinning. I think if I said to Mike, and we actually have the interview with Mike North coming up in just a bit, so maybe we'll ask him this question. But the process that Mike just sort of laid out val essentially did the job of thousands of computers, which Mike said he's a savant, and he is because it's remarkable. So now that the computers have actually done their thing, what happens next, Well, Howard Katz and the team actually

have to present the strongest schedule to the commissioner, Roger Goodell. Now, the schedule has got to feature the best teams and player matchups every single week. But what happens at the end of March when free agency hits or team trades. It's star quarterback I don't know, like Russell Wilson all of a sudden is a member of the Denver Broncos, and the rest of the a f C West goes on a free agent spending spree that we have maybe

never seen before. Well, when we return on NFL Explained, I get the chance to talk to Mike North about how free agency blockbuster deals and how other small details could possibly affect the schedule. Right before the release state, Hi, I'm Mike. Yeah, I mean, welcome back to NFL Explained. Now this week we're breaking down how the NFL schedule is created. But before the break, we got into the history and how technology has made this almost an impossible

job just a little bit easier. But each year during the off season, there are little things that pop up or massive things that will arise, like a player switching teams that suddenly changes the algorithms and the computers that are running to create the best possible schedule. So this off season, which has been filled with major personnel changes around the league, I I've been calling it. I know people around the office have been calling it the craziest

offseason that the league has ever seen. That probably created a little bit of issues for the algorithm or algorithms I should say plural, because without sends of computers, like, there's a lot going on here. So I got an opportunity to sit down out with Mike North to see how challenging it actually is to create this season schedule. Mike, I think every single year, it's pretty clear that there

are inherent challenges that are unique to the schedule. What's the biggest challenge for this year, Well, there's a few of them. One of them was all the uncertainty as we started the process. Generally speaking, you walk into that room the day after the Super Bowl, and you know Howard Kat's and Annie Bows and the team already have a feel for uh, this is musty TV. This is the biggest game or the top three biggest games of the year. Here's a couple of teams we think are

on the rise. Let's make sure we showcase them properly. U. I'm not sure we had that when we walked into the room right after the Super Bowl. Obviously Tom Brady was retired at the time. So as I've talked about lots of times, you know, we try to treat each one of these two seventy two games as an asset, and they're all worth something, whether give it a score or a metric, or a rating or a grade, however it is. You delineate between the value of this game

versus that game. Every game has got a score to it. And the Tampa Bay games were worth something when Tom Brady was their quarterback. They were worth something different when Tom Brady was retired, and they were suddenly worth something different again when Tom Brady decided that he had enough. So we, uh, we had to be kind of flexible, you know, even as we started this process, knowing that

there were still some dominoes to fall. Obviously, Russell Wilson changing teams like he did makes you look immediately for a game like Denver at Seattle. You know, our job here is to tell the biggest stories in the biggest windows and make sure that the fans that want to watch the biggest games have an opportunity to you know, the Denver at Seattle game, Russell Wilson's return after twenty years, and all those all pro nods in a Super Bowl ring.

You know, we're not doing our jobs if that game falls it you know, one oh five Pacific time with two other games going on opposite a big doubleheader game on Fox that day. I mean, that's not good use of the Denver at Seattle asset. So how do you find the right home for that game? You know, like we said, Tom Brady coming back, the Buccaneers have an incredible schedule this year. They played Green Day, they played Dallas, they played the Super Bowl champion Rams, they play Cincinnati,

they played Kansas City. I mean, it's amazing all the good Tampa Bay games this year. They were gonna be assets. Even if Tom Brady had decided to remain retired They're obviously worth a lot more with him back under center, So we kind of had to shift like we always do, and we joke, you know, the project changes not only every year but really every day, and this year was no different and in fact, maybe even more challenging than ever. How crazy is the text read with you and your

team over the course of free agency. You mentioned Brady, Look, I was doing shows and it's just kind of wild to see the amount of movement I've classified. This is the craziest you know, offseason maybe the NFL has ever had. Is it is the communication like, oh my god, this is really cooler, Oh my god, Like, hey, the piece of the schedule we just we're working on just got busted. Yeah, bit of both. I mean, the good part about the scheduling team is we are all still fans, big fans,

and your gut reaction to a big move. Yeah, there's a lot of holy cow and o mgs and and stuff like that, sharing of Twitter feeds, um, and then you take a second and now you think to yourself, professionally, oh man, everything we've just worked on for the last two weeks, three weeks, two months, three months. Right in the trash start all over again. Tomorrow is gonna be fun. But you know, this is what makes the NFL so great. You know, it's not just the off season movement, but

you know it happens in season as well. I mean, look what happened last year and the last few weeks of the season. You had teams go from you know, the one seed to missing the playoffs. You had the Rams play in for the two seed, losing in the final week, dropping all the way to the four still

end up posting the championship game. You know, every weekend, as you go down the stretch right there, the league seems to turn on its ear, and so the scheduling team is busy at that point as well, thinking about flexible scheduling for Sunday night and Saturday games and looking ahead to which games are gonna be scheduled in which playoff windows. So it's great as a fan that there is so much uncertainty and so much turnover and so

much volatility in the league. But yeah, as a member of the scheduling team, yeah, it'd be nice if everybody just picked their teams and stayed in one place on February seven, But we know that's not how it works, and we were braced for it this year, and I think we got a lot of good experience last year with our first seventeen game eighteen weeks season. We knew that that the solution space, which was already essentially infinite

um more than doubled or tripled in size. Now it exponentially increased, just because every single game now has another potential home. We all last year how incredibly vast the solution space was and sort of convinced ourselves, Hey, there's a schedule out there. If you're looking for one that has this game in week four and that game in week eight, and this game on CBS and that game on ESPN, and doesn't give that team a three game road trip and make sure that this team has an

East Coast game on their way to Europe. There's a schedule out there. Mike. What's kind of crazy is we're talking about player movement and the changes that come with roster and how it affects the schedule. You know, Look, maybe this is inside baseball, but obviously a broadcaster myself, I can't help but notice the amount of broadcast teams that have now changed when it comes to play by play and color analysts now switching networks? Does that at

all have an effect on the schedule? Look again, as fans and as consumers and as viewers, it can't not have an effect. I can't tell you that all of a sudden, you know, the ESPN schedule went from you know, A to an A plus simply because they spent all that extra money on bucking Ekman. But you know, certainly their first game together in an ESPN booth. Mmmm, that's kind of interesting. And there's a handful of games this year that are gonna be simulcast on ABC plus you

bring the Manning cast into it. We've got a week now where there's going to be an ABC in an ESPN each with their own game kind of side by side on Monday Night or staggered starts. So, um, did we suddenly change everything because of the broadcaster movement? No? Are we aware of it? And does it factor in a little bit? It kind of has to. You know, we've all got friends who love this announcer and hate

that announcer. But honestly, I'm struggling to think of a time where if a friend has told me that I will only watch a game if that announcers doing it or I will never watch a game if that announcers doing it. But you know, when we were growing up, you remember you turned on the television and you heard Pat summer All or Brent Musburger. You knew it was

a big game. And I think we're all conditioned to know that now with a guy like Joe Buck, and I think when we all turn on Monday night football, you hear Buck a aikman, it sounds like a football game. And is that suddenly gonna mean, you know, a wildly different schedule. No, they're still going to get what they get and you know, obviously trying to maximize for all of our partners, but massive changes, no minor considerations a

couple of times a year. Yeah, Mike, you're awesome. My first time talking to you, I thought you were going to say, no, no, it doesn't affect it. I don't think you were going to say, yeah, it's a factor. But no, I can go, I can go all that. I love this stuff, and I love how everybody has started over the last few years. You know this, this was a black box for a long time. With all due respect to you know, the val Pinchbecks of the world who used to literally have to build this thing

by hand, one game at a time. You knew that wasn't gonna be your best product. And the stakes are too high now and the constituents are too smart that we couldn't really afford to do it that way anymore. So. To the NFL's credit, they put an incredible amount of time and energy and resources and money into doing this project smarter, better, more efficiently. We owe it to our partners, they're paying us an awful lot of money. We owe it to our fans they come to the television weekend

after weekend. We're not doing our jobs if we're not giving them our best product. And so it is a never ending pursuit of, you know, an impossible task. Howard Kats always refers to the scheduling process as the definition of insanity. We do the same thing over and over and over again and expect a different result. One of these days. We just hope that the computers are going to spit out the perfect schedule. Somewhere in this infinite

solution space. It's gonna find the one, The magical, mythical perfect schedule satisfies all thirty two teams, all seven network partners, Uh, that schedule probably doesn't exist. But I'm grateful that the NFL is willing to spend the resources in what maybe a fruitless pursuit, but in pursuit of that optimal schedule. And we're getting closer. We're not there, but we're getting closer. I love your honesty and the fact that you're willing to go there. Uh, Germany, how does that effects this

year's schedule? Well, Germany was interesting because the league, our international partners, are friends over in Germany. At Byron, everybody had sort of rallied around and and almost settled on and frankly almost locked in Tampa Bay as the first host team for our first game in Germany since the World League wrapped up. And yeah, you can't do any better than you know, going over there with Tom Brady.

Then Tom retired, and I know our folks rethought it for a minute and wondered, is there a better path for year one. To their credit, they stayed with Tampa. That's still the team that you know, the fans over there recognized, identify with as I think you know, you know, each of the NFL clubs had a chance to put in for certain international markets, and Tampa saw Germany as a good opportunity for them and a good compliment to their brand, if you will. So it's not without its challenges.

Obviously we're in a World Cup year, so trying to work around stadium availability, Bundesliga schedules, There's still some qualifying left to be done for the World Cup. Um the windows in which we were gonna be able to play some of these international games, we always go through it. In England, we always try to use the international break because obviously Wembley is a big part of international qualifying

in the UK. Now we also had to work around the Bundesliga schedule and the Mexican schedule as we're playing in Mexico City as well, So working around all of that, trying to find the right window of the right day, trying to find the right teams, and then working with those teams to figure out how do you want to handle an international trip. You know you've been doing this long enough, Mike. You know when teams started going over to London eight ten years ago, it was this big,

wild new experience. Teams would leave like the Sunday nights sometimes or the Monday after their previous week's game. Get over to the UK, get into their practice facility, figure out a training schedule, asleep schedule, and eating schedule. It's changed a lot, you know, the sports science world has changed Inched a lot. There's guys going over now Thursday Friday treating it just like a regular road game, which

for some teams, frankly, it is. You know, sometimes the trip to the UK might be less than a trip that you might have to take domestically, like Miami going to Seattle or something like that, so everybody handles it a little bit differently. I'm sure we will learn a lot from this first exposure in Germany, but certainly having Tampa Bay going over and having Tom Brady back at quarterback is going to make that feel like a much bigger experience than it would have probably otherwise. But it'll

it'll be fun. I think this is one of those games that we're gonna kind of point to and look at all year long, and maybe even arm wrestler who's going to get to take that trip and be the game rep Very cool. I'm glad you bring up soccer because I don't think necessarily fans would say, hey, like you know, for the stadium, like there's logistical aspects of it that do impact the schedule on and how you guys put things together locally and I should say domestically

is probably the better way describing it. How does the ASA Base concert in a random city affect your schedule? And if it's not ASA Base, you know, is there you know with concerts and fans going back? Now, like, how does that affect logistically what you guys are trying to accomplish. Yeah, look, other than me needing tickets to the ASA Base show, Uh, it really, it's a stadium

block like any other. I mean, these stadiums we use them, you know, ten times a year, so they are used for other events and depending on the venue, depending on the business relationships. You know, some of our teams own their stadiums, in which case they can clear them out for the entire NFL season. Lambeau Fields a good example. You very very very rarely find anything going on in

Lambeau from August to January. The packers own that building, built that building, and they control that building, and they will very rarely ask for anything in their building that might impact their football schedule. You know, just mathematically speaking, if you have a you know, a stadium block for a concert or a college football game, or a golf tournament, or or NASCAR race or anything going on in your market.

You know, if you ask for a stadium block in the first two weeks of the season, you have exponentially increased the likelihood that you're gonna start the season with two straight road games. And no team would volunteer for that, No coach would volunteer for that. That being said, four the five teams that opened to a way to start

last season one both games. So you never know. But from a stadium availability standpoint, every club's got an opportunity to come to the league office and say, look, we've got this opportunity in our building. We understand fully we can't book it for sure, we don't know until the

schedule comes out mid May. But all things being equal, as you search for the magical, mythical perfect schedule, the one that has us on the road in week seven, so we can accommodate this Elton John or Lady Gaga concert, would be good for our market, would be good for our fans, and and clearly, yes, there are revenue implications for that as well. And you hinted at it, you know,

twenty and twenty one during the pandemic. Not that it's over, but you know, so many of these shows was had to cancel and they're all trying to come back now. And so can all these venues take ten eleven you know arena shows in the fall. They can't. They have to put these football games in here somewhere. Uh. And again it depends on the business relationships. Some of our football teams are literally, you know, tenants. A good example

is in Indianapolis. You know, the Colts are a tenant in that building and there are other events going on in that building all year long. And we have to be strategic about when the Cults are gonna play their road games and when they're gonna play their primetime games. And sometimes the building might not be available on a Sunday,

but it's available on a Thursday. So wouldn't this be a good opportunity for the Colts to host the TNF game so that they don't have a three game road trip, or a road after a road Monday, or an early season by or any of the other things that coach wreck might not like. So um, we work with all thirty two individually. We talked to all thirty one thirty of our stadium operators, and we try to accommodate where we can, but you know, there's a line we really

can't cross. You know, all due respect to Lady Gaga, I'm not sure that we should put out a suboptimal NFL schedule simply because she wants to go to Carolina, then Atlanta, then Tampa. Maybe we can work with Live Nation or whoever it is and say, hey, if you could just reroute and go Atlanta then Tampa then Carolina, we can make a better schedule. You can still have

your tour dates. Those are the kind of things that have to factor into this process while also working on rest discrepancy and travel and by weeks and all the other stuff that we have to worry about. We we do our very best, but it's hard to tell every single club, hey, whatever you need will block you. That's just impractical. But if Bradley Cooper says, hey, I'm going to perform with Lady Gaga on that particular just if I wanted to get complete fan too, so you know,

we'll make sure that one it's it's accommodated. Gay um uh is there? Uh? How do you how do you take into consideration teams that are on the up swing. Like I don't think people would have said, hey, Sincenadia gonna be in the super Bowl. You know last year that's exactly what we got. Is there sort of like multiple football minds in the room going, hey, we should keep our eye on this team. Maybe they could be

that surprise team this year. Yeah, we've tried to over the years try to shift the focus of this whole project from gut and feel and instinct and emotion and more towards math and science and data and predictive analytics, which one is right anybody's guests, But we've tried to pay attention to the data sets that tell us here's what you need to know. You know, Cincinnati last year we thought they were going to be better. We did. Did we think they were going to go to the

Super Bowl? We did not. You know, this year they've earned it, right, So you've got to be wary of overcompensating too far. We've had that in the past. You'll remember the year where Jacksonville made a nice deep playoff run and we're one third down conversion away from going to the Super Bowl up in New England. There we had the year where I think it was Derek ander Sen playing quarterback for the Browns and they threw together a ten and sixth season, and you know, they're hot,

our fans care, they're buzzworthy. Now you've got social media, so you see who they're tweeting about, you see who they're following, you see who's got the Instagram pages. You know, we are definitely trying to tap into what our fans are telling us they care about. But that can be fleeting and we have definitely been guilty in the past. So maybe overcompensating for a team that was on the rise.

But we look at things like everybody else does. Percentage of the salary cap that's available, you know, dead money on the cap, percentage of the salary cap devoted to the quarterback position records in the final weeks of the season. Mike, you you rock man I And once again I did not anticipate keeping you as long as we did, so I do appreciate it. Thank you very much, because I know it is busy for you. Um Mike, how many

games are locked in right now? Right now today on April four, I would tell you we've probably got about five or six locked in, and if not locked in, maybe you've got, you know, some wiggle room between one or two options. We might be rooting for one option, or we might have our thumb on the scale to try to, uh, you know, see one of those options land. But the truth is, the solution space, while infinite, actually shrinks really quickly as soon as we start locking in

a couple of things. So, you know, a guy like Howard Kats has been doing this a long time, was kind of used to telling us over the years. Put this game in week four, put that game in week eight, and I don't know, but I just feel like this game belongs on Thanksgiving weekends. So put it in, and we would put it in, and we'd go we'd make the best possible schedule we could off of those suggestions.

Now as we've all begun to understand a little bit better about the math and science behind the impact of every one of those decisions, Howard would say something like, look, I love the idea of Dallas Green Bay as a Fox doubleheader kind of right in the middle of the season nine, ten eleven. But if you've got to slide it up or down, you know, I think we're better off with that game a little earlier in the season, like Week seven or eight, as opposed to later in

the season like Week fifteen or sixteen. Love the idea of Cowboys Packers playing on a Sunday afternoon in the snow in Lambeau with an NFC one seed at stake. But the later in the season you go, the greater your risk. What if one of those quarterbacks gets hurt. What if somebody's clinched a playoff spot, what if somebody's eliminated from the playoff spot. You want to get maximum return on the asset that is Dallas Green Bay, And the longer you go into the season, the riskier it

gets to maximize the return on that asset. So you know, Howard would tell us, you know, I really like this game here, but if you got to move it there, or the computer thinks it's better here, we're there instead. I'd be open to it. So as far as actually locked in, no more than a handful. But there's a few others that have some pretty restrictive guide rails on it. Mike, we're knocking on the door here. What's uh where we locked in on the schedule in terms of that opening

kickoff game. Yeah, the The truth is, we we lock in a handful of games relatively early in the process. Some of those end up staying from day one right through all the way to schedule released day. Others get moved around. You know, in previous years, Howard Katz has been doing this a really long time kind of scheduling Czar, and earlier in our journey together, Howard would say, you know, I like this game for week six and that game for week eight, and put this game in week thirteen

or whatever you do. Don't put this game in week one, and make sure you put this game in December. And we would usually end up locking those things in and

just trying to solve around them. But as we've learned over the years, you know, one little change like that, one little decision, one little game locked in or locked out, could have an incredibly profound impact on the search strategy, on the algorithm, on the heuristic, and you might end up in a very different branch of the search tree with you know what schedules you're considering just based on that one decision, And that one decision at the time

might have felt right in your gut, but doesn't necessarily subscribe to the Hey this is the mathematically optimal path to go down. So to his credit, Howard's been a lot more open minded in recent years about things like, all right, let's not lock in that game for that week, but let's make sure it's one of these two or three. And kickoffs the great example. As you look at the RAMS schedule, there's a lot of really good options for kickoff,

even you know, a month out, ten days out. We're trying to thread the needle between kind of locking things in and letting the computer know what we wanted to do, but also leaving enough flexibility because changing the kickoff game may somehow miraculously save Jacksonville or Houston or Carolina from a three game road trip in December. So you never

know the impact of each one of these decisions. So you want to leave the computer enough flexibility while still hitting one of the targets that you set for yourself. And as far as kickoff goes, you know, there's great options there really are. San Francisco at the RAMS would be a fantastic kickoff game. They played three really good games last year, including the NFC Championship and having that

rematch in Week one. That's something we could point to all summer long and say, can't wait for that one? You know, that being said, a game like Rams Niners may actually gain in compelling nous, if that's the right word, if we save that one for later in the season, because there's likely to be playoff implications when those two teams play each other twice, And if I could wave a magic one, I'd probably want to save both of those games for the second half of the season, both

in national television windows. And I'm not sure Week one is the right way to deploy that asset, so you look for another option. The Rams host Denver this year, you know, with Russell Wilson playing quarterback, never more interesting than they're gonna be in Week one. I could certainly see a lot of attention on the Week one game if it is Denver at the Rams. Russell Wilson has a long history against the Rams and playing against guys

like Aaron Donald. It would be fun to see him running around in a different jersey, but playing the Rams. Uh in there for kickoff. That being said, there may be other ways to deploy that very first Russell Wilson game. UH in a Denver Broncos uniform. I'm I'm sure that Broncos fans would love to see that game at Mile High,

have that game in Denver. They do visit Seattle this year, so we know Russell's going back to Seattle at some point, and you know, along his story and a lot of Pro Bowls and a Super Bowl ring, those fans are gonna want to, you know, turn out and thank him for that. That could be Week one, that could be Week seven, that could be Week fourteen. Anytime you do it, it's still gonna be a good story, you know, speaking of good stories, Buffalo at the Rams in week number

one would be fun. Like we said, Aaron Donald's got a lot of experience chasing Russell Wilson around. I'm not sure he's chased Josh Sallen around him up, but I'd watch that. That would be fun. And then, of course you can never go wrong with Dallas. We did Dallas at Tampa last year for kickoff. Dallas at the Rams this year would have that same sort of four months of excitement building once the schedule gets out to when

is the season finally going to start? So there's a lot of really good options for kickoff a month out. I'm not sure we're aligned yet a week out we may not honestly be aligned. Knowing we have good options helps us a lot because it enables us to go down a lot of different paths, explore a lot of different branches of the solution tree, and the best schedule quote unquote overall for the league could end up with any one of those four games on kickoff, and I

think we'd be happy with just about any one of them. Awesome, Awesome he signed me up. So with all the poticial matchups for the first week and Mike lay them out, I mean I'm not alone, right like, this is gonna be kind of a badass week number one. I mean, I don't really see a bad option no matter which way the league decides to go. But as soon as the schedule is released, where do you have to go

to check it out? Nfl dot com. The full schedule will be up there analysis I'm sure from plenty of experts weighing in on not only the Week one matchups but some of the ones down the road. But I am so thankful that Mike was able to walk us through some of the details that will affect the schedule and really just his job personally. Now that we've gone through,

what the process is, what happens next? Well, I'm gonna leave you with this last little clip from Charlotte Carry and Mike North about how they spend each day from January to May searching for the near perfect schedule to present to Howard Kats and eventually getting the final approval from Roger Goodell. Little hint here, they're not getting a

whole lot of sleeping. I'm Mike Camp, Thank you so much for listening to this edition of nflis point Mike and I meet, and our day really starts at eleven PM. The night before Mike and I meet, all of the solvers are off and running. We check in, We see how things are going, see what's solving on each of these clusters that we have. We have, you know, anywhere from like three to five thousand different computers working on

this problem for the entire night. I generally go to bed and Mike stays up and takes the nightshift and basically babies. It's the computers we have, hopefully, uh you know, anywhere between fifty and a hundred schedules that we're looking through. Have to cipher through those, and I take generally the sixth or eight best and send them to Howard and

Hans and the entire team. Oh nice, we got a nice low score here at three with really good NBC schedule, great Devil headers, I like those cross flexes, good ESPN, really strong start on a good Saturday pool. This one is definitely a candidate for a deeper dive. We'll put this one through the analyzer, sent it around to Howard. Hopefully we'll have a new leader today, and then once we get into the meeting, we then do a deep dive on the analysis unless we do like maybe a

Green Bay Mini or something like that. I did ask researchs to send over a couple more numbers, and then after those meetings regroup at eleven PM and do the same thing over and over and over until we find the mythical, magical perfect schedule. Monday night, we're finished. Um, we've got a winner, presented to the commissioner this afternoon. Uh, there she is, in all our glory, finally declared our final schedule about eleven o'clock at night, presented to the

Commissioner on Monday, and uh, it's it's really good. Glad it's over. We'll be calling the clubs tomorrow Tuesday, with their schedules released to the world on Wednesday night at a tea time for Friday morning and uh Monday we start on the schedule, really looking forward to getting back at it. Maybe get some sleep this weekend, certainly let Charlotte get some sleep. That's it.