The NFL’s schedule makers face many challenges in creating the yearly 82-game season. They must account for stadium and city factors like not scheduling teams from the same market (such as the New York Giants and Jets) and ensuring marquee matchups occur late in the season.

They also try to balance each team’s strength of schedule and consider travel to avoid having a team play three straight road games.

Creating the Schedule

The NFL schedule makers must consider many factors when constructing the 272-game season. They need to find good matchups in TV windows that fans will watch, and they also have to make sure that important games occur when they can best benefit the league’s broadcast partners. They also need to take into account external events that might conflict with games or create traffic or logistical nightmares at stadiums. The league begins collecting information about events that could cause scheduling conflicts in January, and the schedule makers will try to work around those as much as possible.

In addition to the external constraints, the NFL uses a computer program that takes into account previous year’s results to determine which teams have the most difficult and least difficult schedules. This helps to ensure that the league’s teams have a fair chance of making the playoffs. However, the fact that team composition can change from year to year means that this method does not always achieve its goal of creating a fair schedule. You can find the schedules from our website ScheduleFul.

Divisional Matchups

It’s no secret that Katz and his team are challenged every year to create a schedule that works for all 32 teams and the league’s broadcast partners. The schedule makers also have to try to balance important primetime games with matchups that could decide playoff races in late December and early January.

Each team plays three divisional games against the other teams in their own conference (one home, one away), two interconference games with the teams that finished the same in their division the previous season, and a pair of “parity” games. Parity games are arranged to reduce the standard deviation in each team’s strength of schedule, reduce the number of pairwise comparisons among opponents, and limit the distance that teams travel for their games.

Creating these game pairings takes time and requires a keen understanding of the quality differences between opposing teams. This is done using a mathematical representation of a team’s schedule, called a graph.

Bye Weeks

Each NFL team has one bye week during the season, a period of time that allows players to recover from minor injuries and treatments, rest their bodies and minds, evaluate how they’ve played over the previous few weeks and hone strategies for future games. The byes help the league avoid overly taxing stretches of games, reduce travel distances and balance win totals.

Choosing when and how often to schedule byes is an art and a science that requires the league’s scheduling gurus to weigh a variety of factors. They must consider stadium availability and other events that could conflict with game times. They also have to ensure that teams’ upcoming schedules don’t include too many matchups against other top teams.

The schedule makers’ goal is to create a slate of games that drives revenue and delights audiences. Each year, they have to juggle hundreds of thousands of possible schedules before making their final selection. And that number continues to grow each year as the NFL expands its flexible scheduling options in an effort to showcase late-season games with larger audience appeal.

Travel

In addition to balancing win-loss records, schedule makers must also work around stadium availability for certain teams. If a team shares its home field with another sports franchise in its city, for example, the NFL must find a different venue for its game.

The NFL tries to limit how often a team travels across the country in a short amount of time, especially when it faces an opponent coming off its bye week. It also tries to avoid having a team play three straight road games.

The league’s six executives create thousands of possible schedules before choosing the final version, which is published each spring. The NFL uses a mathematical graph to help determine which teams should play each other, based on the previous year’s division alignment and finish in the conference. The league also uses a formula to ensure that each team plays every other team in its conference at least once every four years.