Inside the process of making the NFL schedule

THE ONE AND ONLY certainty about the 2009 NFL schedule to be unveiled tonight is that not everyone is going to be happy with it.

Some teams won't like the placement of their bye week. Others will gripe about a three-game October road trip or playing four of their first five games against playoff teams or having to make a cross-country road trek the week after a Monday night game.

The league's television partners also won't be completely happy. Fox and CBS will complain about some of the games they lost to NBC, ESPN and the NFL Network, and ESPN will complain about the quality of its Monday night package, and NBC will complain about having to pay for an extra driver to get the Madden cruiser from Miami to Seattle for back-to-back games in December.

"This is one of the most complicated and complex things I've ever been involved with," said Howard Katz, the NFL senior vice president for media operations, who, for the last 4 years, has been the lucky guy charged with constructing the league schedule.

"You're trying to serve 37 different masters - the 32 individual teams and the five networks. Everybody's lobbying and their interests aren't always consistent. So what we've got to do is look at how we can produce the best overall schedule from a league perspective that is fairest for all of the teams and is as fair as we can make it for our [television] partners."

Katz and a team of assistants have spent the better part of the last 2 1/2 months crafting the 256-game schedule that will be announced at 7 tonight on the NFL Network. They rolled up their sleeves right after the Super Bowl, and have been working 6- and 7-day weeks since.

They finally finished it late last week, but were still "tweaking" it as late as yesterday afternoon.

"Because of what it is, we always think we can make it a little better," Katz said.

Better, but not perfect.

"The perfect schedule would be perfect spacing for every one of the 32 teams," he said. "Alternate home and away weekends. Everyone would have a midseason or late-season bye. You'd have no three-game road trips. You wouldn't play over any stadium block requests. It's impossible.