Offseason QB moves played big role in formulating schedule
When the NFL schedule makers started to dig in after the Super Bowl on putting together the complex puzzle of a 272-game schedule, Tom Brady had just retired, Russell Wilson was in Seattle and the free-agent frenzy hadn’t even started.
After sifting through more than 100,000 schedules out of a possibility of more than one quadrillion possibilities, the final schedule that the NFL released on Thursday had Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Wilson and his new team in Denver getting prime-time television windows in Week 1.
The Bucs were given the opening Sunday night spot against the Dallas Cowboys, while Wilson’s debut for the Broncos will come against his former Seahawks team in Seattle in the opening Monday night game.
“In the old days, building this thing by hand, we might have been in Week 8 or 9 by the time we got Russell Wilson moving to Denver,” NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning Mike North said. “Maybe we could have adjusted one or two things, but maybe not a wholesale stop and restart. Now thanks to the way the technology enables us to attack this process, we could stop, take a break, re-evaluate and talk to our partners, talk to our bosses and start all over again and within a couple of days we had a whole new path and a whole new plan that would maximize each of those Denver games, each one of those Tampa Bay games. We probably weren’t going to do that before those quarterbacks moved.”
While changes in free agency and the draft are always a factor the schedule makers have to deal with, this year’s retirement switch by Brady and new homes for Wilson and Deshaun Watson were higher-profile ones that had a large impact on the schedule.
What once was done by hand on a cork board by one NFL executive is now handled by a cloud of computers provided by Amazon that can run through all sorts of permutations each night before the league picks the one schedule it believes optimizes as best as possible fairness to both teams and network TV partners.
The league tries to balance which networks get the most high-profile games. A Bills-Chiefs playoff rematch was given to CBS; a matchup between Brady and Patrick Mahomes will be played on Sunday night for NBC; an NFC championship game rematch between the Rams and 49ers goes to ESPN on Monday night; Amazon gets flashy quarterbacks Mahomes and Justin Herbert for the first game of its new exclusive Thursday night package; and Fox gets what could be the final game between Brady and Aaron Rodgers.