[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Orioles1966

The NFL schedule would be a lot easier if they gave one conference a bye in week #8 and the other conference a bye in week #9.

Probably not preferable for television reasons — having a slate of games from each conference available for national broadcast is likely a desired item.

In terms of schedule creation, the following quote from the book Pro Football Schedules — A Complete Historical Guide from 1933 to the Present by Ivan Urena, and published in 2014, may be of interest.

To meet the rigorous scheduling demands with thousands of different variables and constraints, the NFL turned to Rick Stone, a Canadian manufacturing engineer. Stone, president of Optimal Planning Solutions, developed a specialized optimization software that provides scheduling solutions for professional sports leagues.

When the 2009 schedule was created, for example, Stone's software generated roughly 1.3 million schedules which were narrowed down to 3,500. "Of the 3,500 schedules we actually finished, we probably took 50 of them and read them all the way through," [Howard] Katz [scheduling official with the NFL] said. "What I mean by that is, once we get what we think is a playable schedule, we'll post that and say, 'Here's our leader. This is a schedule we're prepared to play.'"

"We won't look at another schedule until we think it's better," he went on. "This year [2009], we went through probably another 50 finished schedules. So, once we got a finished schedule, we probably improved it roughly 50 times, where we said, 'Okay, this one is better.'"

In 2010, out of an estimated 500,000 schedules that were generated, Katz and his team reviewed "5,000" playable schedules. According to Katz, "Then we keep generating more and more schedules, trying to find something that's better than the one we've got. We probably went through 50 finished, completed schedules that we wanted to see if they were better than the schedule we had. It's almost like a bake-off."

In making the 2012 schedule, the computer program, which has been in use since 2004, provided "400,000 complete or partial schedules," and generated "14,000 playable schedules, which were reduced to 150 with an eyeball test."

In 2008, in a CIO.com article, Stone mentioned there are some 6,000 factors that are considered in creating the 256-game schedule. Stone said: "Say you're going to buy a lottery ticket, and you're trying to pick six numbers out of 50. That's like 15 million combinations, or something like that. So if picking six out of 50 is so difficult, imagine the number of combinations of picking 256 out of 6,000. It's astronomical."

[Michael] North [NFL director of broadcasting planning and scheduling] said in the same article: "Any factor you can think of has to be factored into this decision." He added: "Frankly, it's staggering that the National Football League, a multibillion-dollar company, was arguably taking its most important asset — the schedule — and building it by hand only about 10 years ago. It's remarkable to think where we were not that long ago . . . . Now we get to look through thousands and thousands and thousands of [schedules] and pick the ones that are fairest overall to everybody as opposed to being able to get one done."

The software has allowed Katz and North to work more efficiently. "We can see the opportunity costs of some of our decisions," North commented. "Whereas in the old days, once you put Cincinnati and Cleveland in week five, that decision was made. You just have to go down that path . . . ."

"The beauty of the software is that we can go into every single game, every single week, every single team, every single place where we could be playing a game and we put some parameters around it," North said. "You can say to the software: Mix and match these any way you want to, just know that each game comes with a certain set of parameters. I don't want to play this game any earlier than week three or this game any later than week 14. That game should fall in sweeps week, somewhere between 9 and 12. That game should be in Pittsburgh instead of in Cleveland. That game needs to be on a Thursday night, which means that both teams need to be playing a home game the week prior. The software," he adds, "can do what we were only dreaming of doing 10 years ago."

According to Katz, "The whole scheduling process is far more sophisticated than it's ever been, and it's a combination of manual input and allowing the software to solve the rest of the puzzle . . . . It was successful because it helped us ensure there weren't any really bad television windows anywhere. Even our weakest weeks were better than our prior years had been."