They begin by laying in most of the 42 prime-time games. Then they will pencil in specific games for CBS' and Fox' doubleheader weekend games. They then will put that information, along with all of the stadium-block requests, into the computer.
"The computer will spit back a schedule to us," Katz said. "We'll then manually look at the penalties, look at each team, look at the television [situation] and say either, 'OK, this is one we can work with,' or 'there's no potential here,' and throw it out."
Katz said this year the computer generated about 1.3 million schedules. Of that number, he and his team looked at about 3,500. The 3,500 they looked at were determined by the number of penalty points.
"Of the 3,500 schedules we actually finished, we probably took 50 of them and read them all the way through," Katz said. "What I mean by that is, once we get what we think is a playable schedule, we'll post that and say, 'Here's our leader. This is a schedule we're prepared to play.'
"We won't look at another schedule until we think it's better. This year, we went through probably another 50 finished schedules. So, once we got a finished schedule, we probably improved it roughly 50 times, where we said, 'OK, this one is better.'
"A lot of it is trade-offs. We thought we had a pretty good schedule about a week ago that we loved for television and loved for 30 of the 32 teams. But there were two teams where we said, 'You know what, we need to fix this.'
"So we went back and specifically tried to address the issues with the two teams. In doing that, a lot of other things fall apart, like a doubleheader week for one of the networks."
So, no perfection, but a playable schedule that Katz feels is reasonably fair to the league's 32 teams and its broadcast partners and won't have anyone threatening him with bodily harm.
Which is good, because he's already playing hurt.
"I'm going to have hernia surgery," he said. "I've been postponing it until after I got the schedule done." *
