UPDATED 13:34 EDT / MAY 29 2014

How the NFL optimizes broadcast schedules with IBM hardware | #IBMedge

#IBMEdgeOnce “an exercise in pain management,” NFL game scheduling has become vastly easier in the past few years thanks to some powerful IBM number-crunching. Mike North, Senior Director of Broadcast Planning and Scheduling was at IBM Edge to thank IBM “for their generosity in lending us, really each year, the latest and greatest” hardware that allows the NFL to get that much closer to creating “an optimal schedule.” He stopped by theCUBE to talk about technology in sports and the massive changes in data have impacted the sports industry.

Scheduling football games is a complex balancing act

 

Ten years ago, the NFL schedule was created by hand. North said, “we had one schedule in ten weeks,” and regardless of the time and effort they put in, someone always got the short end of the stick. The difficulty is simultaneously meeting the rating needs of NFL’s network partners, CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL’s own NFL Network, and the health and competitive needs of the clubs themselves. Figuring out how to “maximize the value of each one of those match-ups throughout the entire season” means putting the right game on the right network, but also balancing what’s fair to each team. Some of the constraints on the NFL scheduling team must manage include:

  • Road trips
  • At home games
  • Bye weeks
  • London games
  • Holidays — Thanksgiving and Christmas
  • Double headers

Each team has specific requests that they turn over to the league at the beginning of the season that the schedulers must take into account. And the desires of the teams don’t always match with those of the networks.

Each team has specific requests that they turn over to the league at the beginning of the season that the schedulers must take into account. And the desires of the teams don’t always match with those of the networks.

  • 2015: the year of additional constraints

In 2015, North mentioned, there will be an additional requirement that the NFL scheduling team must take into account. Since 2015 is the year of “Super Bowl 50,” North said, “the entire season is going to be a celebration of all these Super Bowl rematches that are going to be played throughout the 2013 season.” These celebratory rematched, though, can’t all be played in weeks one and two because then that whole “narrative thread” would be lost from the season. It’s just another spinning plate the team has to account for in their balancing act.

Where technology makes a difference

 

Replying to Dave Vellante’s question, “How does technology play into helping you to squint through all this,” North explained that the scheduling team has come a long way from doing everything by hand. Every year, North said, IBM lends the NFL up to 40 “60-core machines with 3.2 gigahertz of clock speed.” Running on those machines is a simulation that Optimal Planning Solutions software and the scheduling team worked on together. This simulation allows NFL schedulers to enter all the information they consider every year into the program, which churns out a “finished schedule, completely built, top to bottom.”

  • Iterations make for a more well-rounded schedule

#IBMEdgeThe next step, North said, is to analyze the schedule, asking: “Who’s got the worst schedule, who’s go the best schedule? Is this a good Monday night schedule? Did the games fall where we wanted them to? Which teams have issues — three game road trips, multiple cross-country trips, games on the road against teams coming off their bye? […] And then you look at it from all five television network standpoint.” Once the schedule has been reviewed, the schedulers make a few alterations, “change some rules, change some constraints, alter some priorities,” and then run the schedule through the simulation over and over again. The technology from IBM and Optimal Planning Solutions has given the NFL scheduling team the time they need to perform many more iterations until they come up with a schedule that works best for everybody.

Data and Fantasy Football

 

In response to Jeff Frick’s question about the data side of fantasy football, North said “It’s really changed the way fans ingest the game.” This new level of interaction, North said, has to do with how instant statistics have become: to answer “When was the last time a rusher did this? When was the last time a quarterback did that?” no longer requires “pouring through records.” “The grown of fantasy football,” North added, “what it’s down to as much as anything, is it makes every game mean something to somebody. And they all do — every play, right? Every game matters.”

  • Solving business challenges and building entertainment value

North stressed that quite a few of the exciting changes outside of the game in the NFL — including the months of discussion around the NFL draft and the days of hubbub around the schedule — are due in large part to the technology the NFL is leveraging. “It just goes to show you,” North said, “the value of the hardware and the software, and the analytics and the big data. If we were doing a poor job of creating this playing schedule every year, I’m not sure the fan interests would be as big.”


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