Have You Ever Wondered How an NFL Schedule is Made?

Have you ever wondered how a 272-game NFL schedule is made? (Here’s a hint: It involves 5,000 computers).

It's fascinating to see how technology has progressed over the years to help organizations complete intricate tasks such as this one. So how does it all work? With some help from their partner Amazon Web Services, the National Football League is able to calculate trillions of possibilities that include when each game will be played and what networks they will be broadcast on. League officials then look at more than 80,000 of those scenarios before making a final decision.

The process itself starts as soon as the previous season ends. This allows the league to know what inter-divisional opponents will be playing each other and what venues will be used for those games, and that’s when the stick handling really beings for the league. The league allows for input from all 32 teams, taking specific requests that usually come from the home team of any given game. Due to stadium availability or other major events in the city, teams may request for certain blocks of their schedule to be played elsewhere.

The league then works through trillions of scenarios that get calculated by approximately 5000 AWS cloud computers. The core of each schedule is structured around roughly 80 seed games that include prime-time matchups and various games that take place around major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. This cycle repeats until the league then settles on a final schedule.

In the past, this was all done manually. Imagine how tedious and time consuming that must have been. In 2017 though, the NFL partnered with Amazon, and now their schedule-making process if fuelled by cloud technology, allowing them to create a more ideal schedule for their teams and television partners. That's progress.