Rams-Chiefs Game Complicated Schedule

From Peter King MMQB--

[www.si.com]

CALLING ALL SCHEDULE NERDS!

If you’re bored by the process of making the NFL schedule, please skip this section. It’s straight from Schedule Nerdland. But I like it, and it’s a cool example of how the sausage gets made.

Sometimes in the process of gathering information for my annual how-the-NFL-made-this-year’s-schedule story, I hear interesting stories about things pertaining to the schedule, often from people around the league, sometimes from people inside the Val Pinchbeck Room, where over four months of digital trial-and-error, four NFL employees get the 256 regular-season games arranged.

This year the story is about the Rams-Chiefs game in Mexico City. Do you see the photo above? It’s a stack of “dead schedules,” those that looked very promising and passed muster enough to get hard looks from the master of the schedule, Howard Katz. After I left the Pinchbeck Room on Thursday evening, I made a few calls to see how the schedule was playing out in the league (favorably in most precincts, I heard). And a couple people were talking about Rams-Chiefs, and how that become one of the really attractive games in the league this year. They wondered how ESPN got it—and whether CBS or FOX (for a Thursday nighter) or NBC (Sunday night) was in the mix.

The answer, as it turns out, is they all were.

Think of the game: Two division champs, each likely to be very good in 2018, exporting the game to a place sure to draw 100,000, in what is likely to be a frenzied atmosphere. There was the added zest of the Chiefs trading one of the best young corners, Marcus Peters, to the Rams this year, and Peters wanted to exact revenge on the Chiefs.

The league pegged the game for Week 11. Apparently the schedule-makers, Katz and Mike North particularly, originally preferred the game to be on Thursday night. Rams COO Kevin Demoff told me yes, this was the case, and the urging to make this a showcase game began at the Super Bowl. For two reasons: The league wanted to reward FOX for rescuing it by bidding up the Thursday night rights fees—now $660 million for the 11-game package, an increase of 30 percent from 2017—and simply for a potential huge rating for a package of games that needed the boost based on falling 2017 Thursday viewership. Plus, it was likely to be a really fun game, and the bigger the audience, the better for the NFL.

A couple of problems. The league couldn’t bring two teams to Mexico City on a short week unless they had their byes the week before. And no team wants a Thursday night game coming off the bye, because that likely would mean the team would have to return to work on the Saturday before the game, cutting a couple of days from the players’ time off. For players, that’s a taboo. In addition, there was problem for the Rams: Customs at Los Angeles International Airport closes at 12:30 a.m. daily. The Rams likely would have to stay overnight in Mexico City and leave the next day to account for that. Teams hate staying on the road after road games.

It was the Rams giving up the home game to make the Mexico game a reality, so the league had to make it right for them. Demoff said North worked on him during Super Bowl week about playing on Thursday night in Mexico. “But we were adamant that it could not happen,” Demoff said. “Especially on a Thursday, with the bye issue. And for any prime-time games, we’d have the Customs issue at LAX. We thought this game should be a Sunday afternoon doubleheader game.”

Early Sunday was out, because the Rams would push back against a 10:05 a.m. PT game; West Coast teams hate the early-body-clock games. The Sunday doubleheader was interesting … but what would happen if the scheduled Sunday night game ended up having to be flexed out, and the league wanted to put Chiefs-Rams in there? Tough to flex to a game in Mexico, and say to NBC: You’ve got to do an international game in 13 days. Similarly, if the league made it a Sunday night game, what if the Chiefs or Rams stunk and the league had to flex out of the game? Tough to tell CBS to get a crew into Mexico that fast.

As for Monday night, the Customs issue was real for the Rams. What, the schedulers thought, could happen if we gave the Chiefs and Rams their bye in Week 12—Thanksgiving Week? That week traditionally doesn’t have byes, because it’s tough to build a good Sunday schedule when three Thursday games are removed for Thanksgiving and there’s both a Sunday and Monday nighter. Giving two teams byes would mean a thin 10-game daylight slate for Sunday.

But the NFL saw it could build a decent schedule and still give the Chiefs and Rams byes. Pats-Jets plus a Jags-Bills playoff rematch in the early CBS window; Giants-Eagles and Russell Wilson-Cam Newton in the early FOX window; Steelers-Broncos as the CBS doubleheader game; the Packers-Vikings rivalry on Sunday night; Deshaun Watson-Marcus Mariota on Monday night. Not the best Sunday of the season, but not bad either.

And so it happened. The bye is late, but for two teams hoping to make the playoffs, look at it this way: Two teams (Washington and Carolina) have byes in Week 4, which means they’ll play three games, have a bye, then play 13 straight weeks. Now two teams have the bye in Week 12, which mean they’ll play 11 straight weeks to start the season, have a bye, then play five games at a time of the year when the bye is likely needed more than Washington and Carolina needed in Week 4.

That’s where this photo of the pile of schedules comes in. I’m told some of them died because of the Rams-Chiefs kerfuffle. But it got solved, without much attention. And now you know how problems get worked out with the schedule, and why, in part, it takes four people four months to do.

Some perspective, from North: “The incredible thing is not even that we get through half a million schedule possibilities now … The miracle is Val Pinchbeck used to build this thing by hand. One game at a time. Not even being able to consider things like rest disparity, travel, stadium blocks, not even being able to think about, oh, so-and-so caught a three-game road trip last year so it shouldn’t happen to him again. We can be really discerning now.”

In the end, the NFL considered 59,031 schedules, including some of the dead schedules that had Rams-Chiefs in all different windows. That’s something, very likely, Pinchbeck’s schedule could never have contemplated.