Really fascinating topic and great number-crunching here. One thing that stood out: the Lions have been negatively affected by this a lot less than I would have expected.
One other thing: you’ll be shocked to learn that GB is near the top of the league in playing games where they’ve had more rest than their opponents.
I mean…surprise? Teams that are popular and have a lot of nationally televised Mon/Thursday games tend to have schedules that are harder to balance in terms of opponent preparation. This is also over a span of 10 years, which equates to most of these stats being meaningless and shows that the NFL scheduling is actually pretty decent seeing as most in the ‘More or less rest than opponent’ are single digit numbers, which means a team is generally either a +/- 1 in that category for most years.
Add to that the fact that the NY teams are forced to schedule around one another, which impacts flexibility for the league.
I just screen shotted this and I will be anxious to see how the details of the individual matchups compare to my gut feeling over the years. My feeling for the Packers is they tend to get a skewed schedule in their favor. When you look at their opponents you see a few tough matchups of note. But when the schedule comes out they tend to get one of those notable games turned into a scheduling advantage. This is the kind of scheduling I was referring to when I referenced Brady and the Bucs. We know the Pats/Bucs game is a big one. But if they put the Pats on the road on MNF the week before heading down to Tampa, that’s BS and a scheduling advantage for the Bucs. That kind of stuff happens with the Packers.
I hate the Cowboys the most. I hate the Cowboys so much that I literally root for the Packers when they play. And I never root for the Packers. My hate is that bad. Being America’s Team comes with a disadvantage, and that is getting screwed on the schedule. There are some screw jobs that are rare in the NFL, and some of them I’ve only seen with the Cowboys or in the few times I’ve seen a particular one…the Cowboys were involved (on the short end).
Meshing both teams together into one scenerio…I will tie it together with a scenario where the Cowboys got chit on and even when they made it up to the Cowboys later…the Packers benefitted from it. In 2014 the Cowboys played a Sunday Night game IN New York against the Giants. A Sunday Night game on the road in New York is already a shortened week under normal circumstances. The Cowboys plane didn’t even touch down back in Dallas until 5-6am on Monday. But they had to turn right back around and play on Thursday for Thanksgiving. WTF? Obviously that was a scheduling quirk, so the league likes to make it up later. In 2016 the rare occurance was repaid to the Cowboys by putting the Redskins on Sunday Night Football right before playing the Cowboys on Thanksgiving. Whatever team played Washington on Sunday had a slight advantage, because the Redskins had to divide their attention and know that they had to approach the Sunday game in such a way that still allowed them to play on Thursday. The beneficiary of that was the Green Bay Packers, who played the Redskins that Sunday Night. The Packers didn’t have another game until the following Monday.
In a short NFL season it absolutely does matter. And even over 10 years, single digits absolutely add up. Green Bay, for example, averages one game per year net playing with more rest than their opponents. Philly averages four games per year that opponents had more time than they did to prepare. Sorry, I’m not buying that in a league that’s as close as the NFL, where getting into the playoffs often comes down to a single play in a single game, that this stuff doesn’t have an effect.
Yes, there are always going to be structural issues (teams that share a stadium, dealing with west coast teams, now dealing with international play, etc.) But there are ways you can balance that stuff in terms of where you insert a given team’s bye, and in particular, shifting home vs. away play. And the league doesn’t give a shit. The Texans and Dolphins, for example, have a -9 differential in being home vs. away in prime time games over the last decade.
Whatever algorithm the NFL is using to schedule games should factor these things into its calculations and try to keep things more balanced.
I want to step in and repost the same thing I’ve posted for years because one of the heads of NFL scheduling gets on NFL radio and says the same thing every year. And I honestly see that he’s trying to implement what he’s saying, it just doesn’t quite work out over time the exact way he hopes it would. The NFL puts in the criteria to a computer for a schedule but the eye ball test ultimately determines which one they go with. As people have said, the different events at stadiums and all kinds of other stuff goes into what the NFL types in for the computers to decide. As the thousands of schedules come out, ultimately humans look at them and determine which one to go with. Its understood that there will be certain “pain points,” but the league is supposed to offset those in other ways during the year or over time.
The NFL schedule executive breaks a teams schedule down into some basic elements that they try to balance within the year or year over year. First they establish what they consider a perfect schedule. And by definition establishing a perfect schedule, means what they think the crappiest of all crappy schedules would look like. I will break down the basic elements that are supposed to be front and center when it comes to picking which schedule to go with:
Home/Away - A perfect schedule opens at home and closes the season at home. It also has a nearly perfect wave of alternating games that go home, away, home, away. A perfect schedule doesn’t have long streaks of home and away games nor does it open and close on the road. If you are forced to open and close on the road and/or have a streaky home/away schedule they try to make it up to you in other ways.
Bye Week - A perfect bye week is in the middle of the season. If they hurt you in other ways, they try to give you a midseason bye as a makeup. If they give you a bunch of cool stuff in your schedule, they try to give you a fukd up bye week as an offset.
Primetime Games - Coaches prefer all 1pm or all 4pm games overall so they can establish a routine. But for NFL scheduling purposes, they consider prime time games a good thing. The idea is that the more prime time games you have, the more they are supposed to throw in road games. So a team with 1 prime time game might find that its at home, while a team with 5 prime time games might find that 3 of them are on the road. But this one is really tough to control because the networks have so much control over the prime time matchups. But what’s supposed to happen is if you get screwed in number of prime time games or how many of them are on the road…they are supposed to make up for it elsewhere.
Those are the basics that take priority. The short weeks vs extended prep time are supposed to work out over time. They won’t work out within a given year necessarily. I think prep time overall works in some teams favor over others and the league doesn’t prioritize it enough to correct it completely.
Good insight
And been the beneficiary of “great officiating.”
Excellent post, lots of good insight into how the league thinks about this. Though to me, this is ultimately the key point. However intelligently they might intend to be, they are introducing exactly the element that will inevitably lead to bias affecting things that help or hurt teams. (I don’t think these are always insurmountable things, but they do impact a team’s performance.)
You probably can’t be perfectly balanced, if for no other reason than the uncertainty that comes with games getting flexed. But you could certainly get more balanced by minimizing the touchpoints where human being apply things like the “eyeball test.”
All these things that go into the notion of a perfect schedule could be scored and balanced in a much more neutral, consistent way. You could even still factor things like sexiness of potential matchups into a score—these things can get really sophisticated. But the point is that you have a computer measuring and balancing them over time, rather than a human being going with their gut about things like what counts as the right positive nudge to balance out a negative elsewhere in the schedule.
With 17 weeks in the season now, their should be 2 bye weeks. I think it would be easier to smooth out the overall fairness of 2 bye weeks than it currently is to create fairness with one. Another benefit of 2 bye weeks would be a longer season and shorter offseason.
I’m sure this will come - it increases profit margins too (more NFL weeks). 17 games in a 19 week season. I’d replace a preseason game with a bye week.
I’ve heard it suggested that every team set to play a Thursday night game should have the week before off. That would be an ideal use of the 2nd bye.
This would be ideal. Instead of eliminating just 1 preseason game as they have this year, eliminate 2 and use that extra week as a bye. But, they’re already planning on going to 18 games, so they’ll keep that 3rd preseason game in the schedule as the thing they give up for that 18th regular season game. At that point they’ll be forced to add a 20th week for a 2nd bye.
There is no doubt that there is some human bias along the way. However what you are suggesting is what is already being done. They feed as much info into the computers as they can. In the end there is no perfect schedule that a computer can come up with. In the end you end up with a couple dozen out of the thousands of possibilities where you try your best to talk thru the different “pain points” of each of them. I think for a majority of the league it works out over time. I just happen to think that it works in the Packers favor over time. Which is no different than the pass interference review system. For most of the league it was worthless. But oh by the way it worked in the Packers favor.
Another example of how the league favors the Packers is 2016. We were playing the Packers the final week of the season for the division title. Obviously the division title part isn’t necessarily something the league would have known in advance. But they did know we were closing the year against the Packers at home. So what does the league do to tip that in the Packers favor? They have the Packers play on Saturday at home the week before, while having us play on Monday Night on the road the week before.
But it’s not. At least not if your description is accurate. Literally everything they’re reserving for the “eyeball test” could be systematized to be applied consistently and remove bias. The league chooses not to because they like to reserve the ability to put their finger on the scales.
I think you envision putting in a bunch of data and the computer being able to spit out a perfect schedule. It can’t. That’s why the process takes so long and in the end you need real life eyeballs on it. Every time you put in a criteria, something else gets screwed up.
Once its understood what they are trying to do, it seems like they do a pretty good job of it overall. Its just that they have an outlier like the Packers which we all know the league favors. I just posted in the other thread that it looks like the Packers might be scheduled to play at home on Xmas. That’s a Saturday. So unless their opponent plays that day as well, that means the Packers will once again be going into the final week of the season with more rest.
To put it another way, every single schedule the computers can possibly come up with is flawed. The league puts eyeballs on it to choose which one is the least flawed and which one has the kind of flaws they are willing to live with vs the kind that they can’t live with.
How do those eyeballs decide which is least flawed? How do they rank those flaws in their minds to determine which can be lived with and which can’t? How do they mentally formulate the hierarchy of how much a given negative or positive factor is worth relative to another factor?
Those are all things that the people making these calls are doing in their heads–they’re just doing them in unscientific, inconsistent ways. Human beings are very poor “computers” of that kind of information–at least if your goal is to apply consistent standards to all teams over time, so that no one team ends up with, for example, one game per year over a decade where they net more rest than their opponents.
No one is suggesting an algorithm can create a “perfect” schedule; perfect is in the eye of the beholder. But there is a faulty insistence by the league, and by you, that there is no way to assign a consistent value to these scheduling factors that negatively or positively impact a team, and ensure they are applied consistently across all teams over time. It is absolutely possible to do this. The league chooses not to.
Put it another way: It is absolutely fair to say there is no inherent, objective standard that says a short turnaround time is crappier for a team than opening the season on the road, for example. Human beings need to make those calls and decide what each of these scheduling factors is worth on a positive/negative axis. But once those values are defined, an algorithm should be responsible for applying them consistently, not the eyeball test.
17 games. They didn’t expect half the league to be pissed?
It’s all entered into the computer and thousands of possibilities come out. The only way around humans reviewing the output would be to randomly pick one of the results without looking at it.