Group’s goal: make everyone unhappy
NEW YORK — This is their Super Bowl.
The team of five people who build the NFL schedule will unveil their latest masterpiece this week, with the news trickling out in the coming days leading to Thursday’s release.
If all goes as planned, everyone will be unhappy.
“Every schedule has its warts,” said Michael North, who has been putting them together for 25 years. “Our job is to figure out which ones are truly onerous and unplayable, and which ones are, `Well, this isn’t ideal, but look at all the good that comes with it.’
“If any one of them jumps off the page as this guy is way too happy or way too disappointed, that’s probably not our best schedule. It’s all about making everybody equally disappointed.”
Naturally, everyone involved wants to feel good about the final product, and this collection of beautiful minds — led by Howard Katz, senior vice president of broadcasting — spends months analyzing, debating and reshuffling a Rubik’s Cube of 272 games aimed at maximizing viewership and fan interest while trying to maintain fairness for the teams.
“One of the things people don’t realize is how sophisticated our scheduling process is,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. “We’re considering more variables, more factors than we’ve ever been able to do. Part of that is the technology, and part is our ability to learn every year and get better at it. That’s why the schedule is so much better.”
The process of searching for that closest-to-perfect schedule — like locating a particular grain of sand on the beach — requires co-opting as many as 4,000 computers around the world to work the problem around the clock.
Trillions of schedule combinations are crunched to find the ones that conform with more than 25,000 “rules,” such as this stadium isn’t available on this date, or no team can have two threegame road trips.
This year, Prime Video becomes the exclusive home of “Thursday Night Football,” the latest in a crowded field of broadcast partners elbowing for the best matchups.
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“The puzzle just becomes more complex every year,” Katz said. “We have more and more computer power running at this, then we get into the process.”
The process makes the old system seem so antiquated and quaint, back when NFL executive Val Pinchbeck unscientifically would assemble the schedule by hand on a giant pegboard, working front-to-back and backto-front, then stuffing a bunch of games in the middle.
The room where decades of subsequent schedules were built is now named in honor of Pinchbeck, who died in 2004. That room is now a relic too, with everyone migrating to video calls during the pandemic and staying with them once they proved more efficient.
The Val Pinchbeck Room is small — maybe 10 by 15 feet — on the fifth floor of the league’s Park Avenue headquarters. It’s one of the few offices with frosted glass, and precious few people have a key card to access it. For years, it was permanently stocked with jellybeans and Mountain Dew and
smelled of too many people working too hard for too long.
At one end, Pinchbeck’s artifact of a pegboard. At the other, a white board filled with a convoluted diagram that looks like something out of “Homeland,” but is meant to explain some aspect of networks and early Sunday games. In the middle is a small table that faces a wall of TVS, and the “clubhouse leader,” that year’s best schedule to date, is taped to the lone glass wall.
“We started putting up
the leader in the clubhouse, so that if Roger came down and banged on the glass, he’d have something to see,” Katz said. “There’s a lot of anxiety until we have a playable schedule.”
This much will never change: the complaints.
“Everybody hates their schedule,” North said. “That’s the one thing you can count on. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s legitimate and based in some historical data and win percentages that we should go back and look at. And we say to ourselves,
`That’s probably something we shouldn’t do again.’ ”
“Every year we learn. We listen to our constituents. And even though you’re not supposed to read internet comments, we listen to our fans. We try to figure out which of these team inequities are truly onerous and which are just a bad break.”
Either way, the teams will have something to say.
“They’re not shy,” North said. “And they have very long memories.”