May 14, 2024 • 41 mins
Creating the NFL schedule is a beast of a task! And on this episode of the NFL explained. podcast, Mike sits down with the NFL's VP of Broadcast Planning, Mike North as he explains how it's done!
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
NFL Explained is a production of the NFL in partnership
with I Heart Radio. Well, one of the biggest days
of the NFL offseason. It is knocking on the door.
It is upon us, and no, it's actually not the
NFL Draft. It's the release of the official NFL schedule. Now,
(00:29):
NFL fans, you know, you can start planning your tail gates,
look ahead to see if there's a chance to get
to see Tom Brady one more or ten more times.
I am not convinced that this is the final run
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.
(00:50):
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,
(01:11):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:14):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
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.
(03:18):
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,
(03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:48):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:34):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
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
(06:40):
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
(07:00):
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.
(07:23):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:06):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:11):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:52):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:35):
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
(10:58):
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,
(11:21):
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,
(11:42):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:27):
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
(12:48):
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,
(13:18):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:44):
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
(15:07):
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.
(15:28):
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
(15:48):
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
(16:10):
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
(16:31):
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.
(16:53):
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
(17:14):
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
(17:35):
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,
(17:56):
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
(18:19):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:44):
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.
(21:08):
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.
(21:29):
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
(21:52):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:15):
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
(23:39):
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
(23:59):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:05):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:49):
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?
(26:11):
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
(26:32):
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,
(26:54):
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
(27:16):
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
(27:37):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:18):
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.
(28:38):
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
(29:00):
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,
(29:22):
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
(29:45):
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
(30:06):
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,
(30:28):
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
(30:51):
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,
(31:15):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:58):
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
(32:20):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:25):
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,
(33:46):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:27):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:53):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:36):
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,
(36:58):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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
(38:02):
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,
(38:23):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:07):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:48):
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
(40:09):
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
(40:30):
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
(40:51):
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
(41:12):
at it. Maybe get some sleep this weekend, certainly let
Charlotte get some sleep. That's it.
NFL Explained is a production of the NFL in partnership
with I Heart Radio. Well, one of the biggest days
of the NFL offseason. It is knocking on the door.
It is upon us, and no, it's actually not the
NFL Draft. It's the release of the official NFL schedule. Now,
(00:29):
NFL fans, you know, you can start planning your tail gates,
look ahead to see if there's a chance to get
to see Tom Brady one more or ten more times.
I am not convinced that this is the final run
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.
(00:50):
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,
(01:11):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:14):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
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.
(03:18):
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,
(03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:48):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:34):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
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
(06:40):
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
(07:00):
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.
(07:23):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:06):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:11):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:52):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:35):
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
(10:58):
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,
(11:21):
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,
(11:42):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:27):
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
(12:48):
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,
(13:18):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:00):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:44):
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
(15:07):
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.
(15:28):
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
(15:48):
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
(16:10):
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
(16:31):
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.
(16:53):
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
(17:14):
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
(17:35):
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,
(17:56):
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
(18:19):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:44):
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.
(21:08):
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.
(21:29):
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
(21:52):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:15):
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
(23:39):
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
(23:59):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:05):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:49):
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?
(26:11):
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
(26:32):
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,
(26:54):
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
(27:16):
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
(27:37):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:18):
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.
(28:38):
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
(29:00):
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,
(29:22):
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
(29:45):
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
(30:06):
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,
(30:28):
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
(30:51):
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,
(31:15):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:58):
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
(32:20):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:25):
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,
(33:46):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:27):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:53):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:36):
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,
(36:58):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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
(38:02):
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,
(38:23):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:07):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:48):
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
(40:09):
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
(40:30):
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
(40:51):
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
(41:12):
at it. Maybe get some sleep this weekend, certainly let
Charlotte get some sleep. That's it.
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