How is the NFL Schedule Created? | NFL Explained

there are 18 weeks 32 teams 272 games 576 slots nearly 1 billion options for each team hundreds of trillions of possible combinations overall but there is just one perfect solution go behind the scenes with us as we take you inside the making of an nfl schedule powered by aws [Music] all right here we go when we are in this room which we haven't been for a year but when we're in this room the scheduling process begins with howard katz we feed all the schedules to him he's the authority i usually sit right next to him trying to read his mind trying to understand what he means when he says that sounds like a football game or that doesn't feel right howard cats mike north are the stalwarts they are the ones who kind of drive that engine howard from the you know big picture he's the artist mike is the scientist he is the one who drives the computer having howard and having that gut and instinct and an art side if you will is is a is a huge piece of this entire puzzle and how the schedule gets made you know over time mike howard and i have worked together for so long you know we have an understanding we have an institutional history and knowledge and then when you add you know charlotte carey blake jones nick cooney every piece of the pie kind of contributes to the hole like a well-oiled machine the process runs really smoothly as long as the hardware and the software behave hopefully we can keep finding these schedules day after day and they're getting better and better each day so that by the time we get in front of roger at the end of this process the one we're handing him is one we're really proud of so why don't we start with the thought of what else we would put this in the double header window so all those big double header games could go down and stand alone somewhere if we put two good ones up in week one we're going to have to go get you know another game somewhere to stand alone fair enough if we think green bay new orleans and cleveland kansas city is reasonably comparable i want to see as many options as you can as you can give us okay when the 2020 regular season ended on january 3rd you know monday january 4th we were right on the software loading in what we now knew to be the 272 matchups for 2021 and we start from scratch you gotta figure it out so the match-ups are set by a combination of rotation and previous year's standing the nfl has 32 teams and we are divided into two conferences of 16 teams each and within each conference we've got four divisions of four teams each so now in course of 17 games you're gonna have every team plays their three division opponents each home and away so that's six games then every team in that division will play another division in their own conference two home two 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 two away so that's 14 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 16 and now in an expanded season we'll do the same in the other conference we'll play an inter conference 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'll 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 of 17 weeks so the solution space was already infinite and we didn't just double or triple or quadruple the size of it we exponentially increase the size of it are we always liking this to trying 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 i'm learning i'm learning that was just wow we always knew that a 17 game season was on the horizon possibly 256 games over 17 weeks while already all but impossible was a lot easier than 272 games over 18 weeks and we got some breaking news here for you on this path to the draft pro day special it is now official dj we are going to get an additional game season just got bigger we just added another week i mean you want to talk about the algebra and the algorithms they're going to have to change up everything look i think that when you go from 256 games to 272 games it feels like it's 16 more games how much harder could it be but when you think about it mathematically and the search space 16 additional games and a 272 game grid just made it exponentially bigger i can't even quantify the numbers i've been doing this seven years and i still don't know the easiest way to think about it i found when i explain it to people is if howard cats or roger goodell says to us here's 10 games that i think should be on sunday night football there's 3.6 million ways just to lay out those 10 sunday night football games it's sunday night pride time another game on the list baby another game on a schedule and we need to win better so one game that's on the docket this year is green bay is going to play kansas city patrick mahomes up against aaron rodgers it was something we were robbed of seeing guys back in 2019 i mean come on roger's open 40 the next time those two are supposed to meet each other high-profile quarterbacks high-profile teams fan bases that's about as appealing a game as there is where tampa new england lands it's going to be interesting to see over the next month as we're considering so many possible homes for it there is a lot of excitement in this town about this game for us it's a once-in-a-lifetime sort of game it's tom brady returns and there it is the dynasty continues and that's the hardest part of the job is how do you deploy a game like that this is what we want right here oh stressful bro [Music] um can you tell me who uh val pinchbeck is and what his role was hey hey how are you doing good how are you doing hello hello val is uh 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 it's being part of the nfl when it gone went from sort of a mom and pop thing in the 60s to the kind of big business it is today val 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 turned through hundreds every day you're so good that happened and so val used to build the schedule with a board just like this he would sit here and all these tags these represent home games so this would be washington at los angeles seattle at los angeles 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 the little white circles or some stadium blocks 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 partner so if you like this game this green pin goes in the atlantic 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 atlantic 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'd put the shells on his belly and so after about 20 minutes he'd have a whole bunch of empty shells and he'd get struck by inspiration he'd stand up dump 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 hey this guy's really good now you know what val used to do is uh you know legendary to all of us and then very appropriately that that room is named after him and then we we have a lot of respect and debt for what what he accomplished and set the table for us 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 val 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 gerobi 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 and let us begin what we're able to do between optimal planning solutions and gerobi is we're able to utilize the aws cloud every one of these lines is a different aws computer each of these 3 000 aws computers can be working on a different schedule all at the same time all with the same rules and all talking to each other about what works and what doesn't that works really well that's high quality when we ask 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 base 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 two a way to start and two 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 trip since 2003. we're also writing rules about a strong sunday night football schedule a strong monday night football schedule a strong thursday night football schedule are you not entertained you know 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 most watched window of the nfl of course is sunday at 4 25 and we are loaded that's the day the uh the weekend of the twin cities marathon so you made our folks very happy okay good i hope you post a good time the ability to to work with the team at aws and for our software to run on the aws product 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 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 react to things we can go in and we can look at it these are four separate clusters of aws instances that could be anywhere in the world mike keep it going keep on going don't stop don't stop keep going there's between 200 and 300 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 and 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 double header so it will run on this one seed schedule that one computer for as long as it takes until it figures out if it can find a feasible solution yeah it's gonna be a long day 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 i'm amazed yeah mike and i meet and our day really starts at 11 pm the night before mike and i meet all of these 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 hate time i get tired i generally go to bed and mike stays up and takes a night shift and basically babysits the computers all right last check of the computers before bed thursday night april 23rd here's all the clusters everybody's working found a few schedules there's a good one three nine nine three this one could be interesting let's see if charlotte likes it tomorrow when she wakes up good morning from the carrie household it's just about 5am here on april 23rd thanks to my trusty alarm clock who gets me up around this time every day let's take a look at what we got in here overnight we have hopefully uh you know anywhere between 50 and 100 schedules that we're looking through have to cipher through those and i take generally the the six or eight best and send them to howard and hans and the entire team oh nice we got a nice low score here at 39.93 with really good nbc schedule great double headers i like those crossflexes good espn really strong start and good saturday pool this one is definitely a candidate for a deeper dive we'll uh put this one through the analyzer send 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 you do like maybe a green bay mini or something like that i did ask research to send over a couple more numbers and then after those meetings regroup at 11 pm and do the same thing over and over and over until we find the mythical magical perfect schedule wow [Music] countdown is over happy draft day everyone and good morning let's go cleveland so i think what we should be doing now is identifying what if anything we want to try to fix so much of what's so good about this one is because of the key games chart we should probably keep most of if not all of it really this is really really good no reason not to use the time to try to fix that but we shouldn't compromise everything that we like about this as far as the scheduling process goes we're in a really good spot we've presented a couple of legitimate contenders to the commissioner he had no real significant negative pushback so if we had to we could play either one of those schedules tomorrow the challenge for us is going to be reacting to anything we see tonight if there is a big trade particularly the quarterback position or a draft pick that maybe catches us a little off guard you know are we still comfortable with where we are in terms of national television appearances big story lines coming out of the first couple weeks of the season is there anything that could happen tonight that's going to knock us off our stride i mean is there anything that's going to happen tonight that's going to be one of these established quarterbacks moving yeah right undermining a team we're counting on or propping up a team we didn't expect if something happens there's a fan you say oh that's fun as a scheduling team we're going to say oh that's trouble we are just two hours away from the jacksonville jaguars being on the clock in the 2021 nfl draft live from cleveland ohio weather isn't perfect but that's not dampening anyone's spirit trevor lawrence has been pretty much put in sharpie since the day he was born it seems to be the first overall pick of this draft we're going to see him and zach wilson go 1-2 correct tonight absolutely i think it's gonna start at three that's where the fun is gonna begin tonight nobody knows what's taking place with the 49ers so there's a lot of intrigue in this one tonight rich the draft is now officially open here we go one minute to the commissioner announcing trevor lawrence to jacksonville one minute i'm good i'm anxious the jacksonville jaguars select trevor lawrence i think lawrence is going to play day one and we'll probably find him on prime time somewhere early in the season probably the same with the jets i would imagine wilson it is zach's fifth avenue the longer this clock goes down on san fran the more likely they are to actually make the pick you think so we've kind of been hearing about mack jones my gut tells me trey lance i think trey lance would take this offense in a new direction i'd love to see it i think it's a truly a toss-up what's going to happen pick is in they actually pick kind of rooting for trey lancia that means garoppolo starts and we don't have to blow it all up [Applause] 50 seconds 5-0 to the commissioner announcing trey lance to the niners all right so it is time for one of the greatest mysteries of the nfl draft in recent years the san francisco 49ers select freddy lance [Applause] and ew is the bison i think at this point we can just kind of relax and be fans and hopefully it's not going to disrupt everything we've done the chicago bears just traded into pick number 11. they are on the clock it's got to be quarterback there's no other one hi chicago bear select justin fields quarterback ohio state you know all the quarterbacks went they went to some interesting places fields to chicago is cool jones to new england's pretty interesting honestly i think here at the end we've probably dodged most of the bullets that we're gonna derail us we're gonna get through this one without having to completely undo everything more fireworks if you will here in cleveland ohio that'll wrap it up for night number one all right uh late wednesday evening early thursday morning the day we're presenting the hopefully final schedule to the commissioner i got an email on my phone i had to come see what all the fuss was about could be the magic seed uh present one of these to the boss tomorrow get his feedback still gives us the weekend to keep working if he wants any changes but uh this could be the one let you know how it goes we're under a week away from schedule release we're very close but honestly still not done yet all right leader on the left contender on the right week one still pick buff uh we're gonna go meet with the commissioner here in about an hour we've been checkpointing with him kind of along the way once a week for the last month nothing he's going to see today is going to surprise him and hopefully we can just get you know if not a rubber stamp at least a yep i understand why you did it it's just what you said you were working on and i'm very comfortable with it commissioners on six he's uh literally right above us we'll gather up hans schroeder and howard katz hopefully it's uh for good news at the end i'll be happy on wednesday uh it's gonna be a busy weekend the computer certainly won't stop my wife won't be thrilled with how we're spending mother's day but uh we will give it an honest effort right to the very end and certainly at some point it is pencils down and this is truly the best we can do we're close i'm not sure we're there yet but we're very close monday night may 10th we're finished um we've got a winner presented to the commissioner this afternoon uh there she is in all her glory finally declared our final schedule about 11 o'clock at night uh presented to the commissioner on monday and uh it's it's really good glad it's over uh we'll be calling the clubs tomorrow tuesday with their schedules uh released to the world on wednesday night got a tea time for friday morning and uh monday we start on the 2022 schedule really looking forward to getting back at it maybe get some sleep this weekend certainly let charlotte get some sleep that's it

Channel: NFL Network

Views: 263,786

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Keywords: nfl, nfl network, football, american football

Id: bS1xGetyrh0

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021