What the 2020 NFL Schedule Can Be - and Should Look
The NFL is still planning to release a schedule in May, but they need to consider the possibility of a COVID epidemic resurgence and force them to shorten the season. How can they create a complete schedule that is built to transform into a short season.
To be clear: The sports calendar of 2021 is becoming weird and strange with the day. There are many more important things going on in the world, and while we all want to come back to the sport, where the sport fits in, we are getting a real lesson about the word needed. Being forced to take action (as a November master).
The NFL period had the advantage, the COVID-19 crisis was not considered a crisis until shortly after the Super Bowl. But as the NFL continues to advance the virtual draft and virtual offseason, questions about the 2020 season remain.
The league says it will publish a schedule by May 9 and plan for a general fallout with the emergency situation for a time if it needs to be reduced or adjusted. The details beyond that are scarce.
So I would imagine some of those details myself. Here's what a flexible NFL schedule should look like (or should be).
Before we get to the actual schedule I want to admit that I am not taking all kinds of accounts. Clearly. Scheduling is a Herculean task that requires a very smart computer. My structure dates are not resolved when there is a concert at the stadium, there is a need for parking on the side baseball team, or Pope Philly is coming.
I'm also ignoring Jerry Jones' requests to open a new NFL stadium this year (or none of them will actually end up) in the network or Jerry Jones, who wants certain games in prime time. I know some teams want their farewell week after a London game (which may not happen anyway, so I'll just treat them as canceled). And my goal is not to create a real master schedule that solves all these problems. This is just a smaller and simplified version that shows how to put 25 units in 17 boxes.
However, the NFL plans to set a normal-length season, with the possibility of narrowing things down later, here are a few things the league can do…
Step 1: Interaction Games
It's an easy one: Put all interconnection games (AFC vs. NFC) in the first four weeks. These are the least important games on the calendar, so we can spread them out over weeks that are less likely to be present if any part of the season gets crushed. Don't get me wrong, I like that interconnection games exist every year, but you can argue from a competitive balance point that the power of scheduling within teams at the same conference would be nice without it.
And logically, if the season is to cut it from 16 games to 12, the easiest way to determine the playoff seed is to play the 12 games each team plays in its own conference.
As an added bonus, these four weeks include two home games and two road games for each team. So if those same teams are on Week 1 and 3 and others are at Week 2 and 4, there would be so many home games for each team season, you would spend all four weeks or just spend the first two weeks and 3 weeks on the season.
Of course, starting in the 3rd week under this proposal (thus setting a 14-game season) means each team will play two interconnection games, resulting in some scheduling discrepancies between the division's competitors. After all, someone will play the Ravens and some will play the Bengals. But what can you do? We recognized that this would be an unusual season for every other sport, and I think two extra weeks of fantasy on television, RedZone and actual live football would have meant that this country would have endured the mild disappointment of the unlucky NFC executive.
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Lastly, to make it an unusual start to the NFL season, this kind of schedule doesn't look too foreign to most sports fans. This is not much different from a typical college football or college basketball season, where teams play the majority of their unforgettable schedule to start the year and later move on to their season's meat with known opponents in the endless excitement of their competition.
Side note 1
I mentioned the house/road split above and that place demands more attention. There must be the same number of home and road games for each team in order to justify both the competition and the revenue. It would be tough to do this with a simple NFL schedule, which is why I'm making significant tweets
Except for all the interconnection games, things clearly work out, but may not be the case in other parts of the season. Despite our best efforts, certain views exist where each team may not have the same number of home games. This i
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