- 2 hours ago
Max St. John from the NFL joined Kevin Sheehan on his podcast to explain how the NFL schedule is put together, and some of the quirks of this year's slate - for the Commanders and the NFL at large.
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00:00Max St. John is the NFL manager of analytics schedule planning for the NFL. He's part of
00:09the small group that works to put together the NFL schedule. Mike North, Max St. John,
00:16a couple of others. These are the guys that are locked in a room for several months putting
00:21together the NFL schedule, which came out in its entirety on Thursday night. Max joined me on my
00:27podcast on Friday, and I started off by asking him about whether or not the guys that put this thing
00:35together get frustrated that the thing gets leaked in the days preceding the official announcement,
00:43really on the day of the official unveiling, gets leaked at times in its entirety. I mean,
00:50most of us knew Washington's schedule in its entirety before the 8 p.m. official league
00:57release. Does that frustrate the guys that put this thing together? Here's what he said.
01:03First of all, thanks for having me. Great to be on. We are obviously not a big fan of the
01:08league,
01:08but truth is we need to get this information out to everyone before the official release date. So
01:14kind of going back a few days, we got final approval on our schedule at noon on Tuesday.
01:19From there, it's kind of starting the paperwork, getting the press releases, the team schedules
01:23ready. The teams found out starting at 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. So at that point,
01:28they had their full schedule. They could get everything ready for ticketing, for the social
01:32media unveiling, all that good stuff. Thursday, we reveal it to our network partners. So there is a good,
01:38you know, 24, 36 hours where the schedules are out. And as that kind of gets passed along,
01:44unfortunately, you know, some people are able to pick it up and see some schedules,
01:47something we definitely try and limit, but it's just kind of a factor of how things work in terms
01:53of just getting the teams, the network, the games ahead of the full release. So I guess we try and
01:57limit it as much as we can. Yeah. I guess on some level, like any conversation about this is good
02:03conversation. It's just that it's like Christmas morning in the opening of gifts,
02:09it's anticlimactic. Now when it comes out, there used to be a level of excitement for the buildup
02:14for eight o'clock in the unveiling that we just don't get to experience anymore. But it sounds
02:20like you guys aren't thrilled by that either. All right. So let's start. Go ahead. Did you have
02:26something to add to that? I was just going to say, well, maybe we don't have the excitement around
02:30if teams kind of know all of their games by that point or the windows, there's still the excitement
02:34around the big social media unveiling at 730. That's kind of really turned into its own big
02:38thing in recent years. So that's at least something else we can point to. Yeah, no. And some of them
02:43were really creative for sure. All right. Give me what the big challenges were for you guys as you
02:50took on this task of 272 games over several months. I would say the first one is the number of
02:58international games we're playing. We're playing nine international games. And we have certain
03:02structures that we try and have around those games in terms of rest and coming home after the
03:07international games. Commanders being one of them. Our general practice is if you're playing an
03:12international game the week before, we'll either try and get you home or have a game in the same
03:17time zone or one time zone away. We don't want you taking a super far West Coast trip before you
03:22have
03:22to go to fly to London. Next week being your international game. And then we have a pretty big
03:26commitment. If your stadium's available, we'll either get you a home game that following week
03:30or we'll get you your buy. No guarantee that you'll get your buy. That was previously something
03:34we've guaranteed that we've been able to get away from. But we'll make sure you're at least if you're
03:39coming and playing game and your stadium's available, we'll get you to a home game after.
03:43So obviously a lot of further travel this year. We're playing in Australia for the first time,
03:48had to make sure the Rams and the 49ers got back to a home game after that.
03:52Playing in Brazil, this kind of goes to what I was just talking about. The Cowboys
03:56are playing week three in Brazil. Their stadium's blocked in week four. We can't get them home.
04:00We don't do week four buys. So we had to give them, unfortunately, a road game in week four,
04:04but that was something that's out of our hands. That's probably the biggest complexity going
04:08into the season as our international games grow, continue to have kind of things we need
04:13to work around within the schedule. Do the teams have any input? Do they get a chance
04:19to say, we'd really prefer the bye week, even though it's not guaranteed anymore after the
04:24international trip? Or, you know, certainly there are stadium conflicts, I would imagine that have
04:30to be worked around, but do the teams have any input and do they have, you know, one thing that
04:37they can ask for that they're granted? They absolutely have input. So mid-February every
04:43year, we send out our team forums. The teams get back to us. Our stadium is unavailable for these
04:48dates and these windows. And separately, they have a handful of things. We'd be really excited to
04:54play on Christmas this year. We don't want to do this. We really want our bye after our
04:59international game. So every team has the opportunity to do that. Again, we get a lot of
05:03similar requests. Everybody wants a mid-season bye. Nobody wants to play in Florida in September.
05:08Nobody wants to play in Buffalo in December. So we're unfortunately not able to grant these
05:13requests to everyone. But if there's something we've repeatedly done to a team, a great example
05:18of this is last year, Green Bay reached out to us. They said, hey, we've started our season week one
05:22on the road for seven consecutive years. Why do you keep doing this to us? Can you get us home
05:27in week
05:27one? And that's something where it's like, you know what, that's maybe not something we focus on.
05:31This is a concern to you. We've done it to you for seven straight years. Like, that's probably
05:35something that we should consider. So every team has an opportunity to reach out to us and reach out to
05:40the league office about what's important to them. Again, a lot of the requests kind of overlap that
05:45we can't grant them to everybody, but we certainly listen to all of our teams.
05:48What were Washington's requests back in February?
05:52They didn't have too many. One that we unfortunately weren't able to give them is they
05:56actually wanted to pair their West Coast trip. You guys are playing at San Francisco and at Arizona
06:02this season. So that was something like, hey, if it fell into place, we'd love to kind of pair our
06:06trip,
06:06play in San Francisco or Arizona, and then stay out West for the week and play that next game.
06:11That's something, again, if we did it for every team that requested it, I unfortunately don't
06:16think we'd get a schedule done, but I think it's still an okay place for Washington. They play a
06:20Monday night game in San Francisco, a little extra time to get out there and the guys, not intentionally,
06:25but the guys fell right after that game. So right after their long trip, they can come back to a
06:29buy as well. Do you consider net rest days like a team that had a disadvantage in net rest days
06:37a year ago? Maybe you look at giving more of an advantage to the following year or not?
06:45We certainly look at it. We at the league office, we have a great research group. I'll give Mike Lopez
06:51and Tom Bliss a shout out because they've written a whole paper on this buy advantage and rest disparity
06:57and have kind of come to the conclusion that it's not really impactful for our teams. We feel pretty
07:03comfortable. I think a great example to point out is the 49ers of a couple of years ago, they had
07:07a
07:07negative 20 something rest disparity. They went to the Super Bowl that year. That's not something
07:12we'll have certainly some teams complain about, but as a league office, we feel comfortable releasing
07:16a schedule with teams with a higher net rest disparity than some others because we don't think
07:22it's a big disadvantage for anyone. Truthfully, I don't think it's super impactful.
07:28All right. There were a couple of interesting options for Seattle in the kickoff game on Wednesday
07:35night, September 9th. Why New England and a rematch of the Super Bowl?
07:40To start with, I don't think a Super Bowl rematch is more interesting. It's as interesting as it can be
07:47to really start the season. You'd push it a little later into the season. Storylines from that next season
07:51kind of started to take over. We really wanted to start there. There's actually some kind of cool parallels
07:55because the last time before this year we played a Super Bowl in San Francisco, it was Denver and Carolina.
08:02Super Bowl rematch next year for the opening Thursday night game. So we're kind of having some cool parallels there
08:08as well. And of course, we wanted to spotlight these two teams. Seattle obviously had a great year.
08:13New England went all the way to the Super Bowl. They have countless primetime games throughout our
08:17schedule. We felt pretty good about having that big game week one. Two of our best teams from last
08:21year wanting to spotlight them. You know, I remember maybe a couple of years ago when I had Mike on
08:27the
08:27show, he essentially said there's this kind of a discussion about that first game. Everybody's going to watch
08:35regardless of who's in it. And so why not save the better matchup for another time on the schedule?
08:43But it really looks like you guys have gotten away from that because last year was Cowboys Eagles.
08:48The year before that was Ravens Chiefs. I guess the Lions weren't necessarily supposed to be
08:54good in 23 going into that opener at Arrowhead. But why kind of back to really kind of heavyweight matchups?
09:04I would say I would kind of point this to Thanksgiving of last year. Traditionally,
09:09it is exactly what we had done in our big windows. We know there's kind of a base audience there.
09:14We
09:14can play maybe not our biggest game in those biggest windows. And we really took a swing last year
09:18playing Dallas, Kansas City and Detroit Green Bay on Thanksgiving. And those were our two highest
09:24regular season games ever. So really kind of expanding that thinking across all of these
09:29tempo events. But Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving put one of our biggest games, maybe our biggest
09:34rivalry at the moment, the sort of Brady Manning of our arrow between Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen,
09:39putting that on Thanksgiving night. We're really taking swings there, having some huge games on
09:44Christmas. One that I keep pointing to is not only having Green Bay, Chicago to start the day,
09:49a playoff rematch between Buffalo and Denver in the middle, but also having Seattle Rams as the nightcap
09:54as well. The two teams that were competing with the 49ers for the NFC West last year, they played
09:59some awesome games last year. They played in the NFC Championship, really spotlighting that in one of
10:04our biggest windows. It's an opportunity we wanted to bounce on. I figured that the Rams coming back
10:11from Australia probably wouldn't get a bye week. And then that meant Monday night was, you know, a possibility
10:17at home in week two. But just how about the fact that they've got four primetime games in their first
10:26five weeks with, by the way, the non-primetime game being at Philadelphia? At Philadelphia? Yeah. So,
10:34I mean, is a team happy about playing four standalone primetime games in the first five weeks?
10:41Is that something that they embrace or do you try to avoid it and just couldn't?
10:47I think it depends on the team and the Rams are one that really, really embraces it. They love having
10:53their team in a national spotlight and they were frankly pretty thrilled with their schedule to
10:57have all these national windows. Part of the reason for that as well is, especially that week two game,
11:02there's always complications in shared stadiums. So, there's some stadium blocks around week three
11:07and four and five in SoFi that we knew both teams needed to get home in week two. And so
11:13that meant we
11:14really needed to find a national window for one of those. And that's kind of where Rams-Giants end up
11:18falling. But they're definitely a team that's been pretty thrilled. They had seven primetime games as
11:23well as some other CBS and Fox doubleheaders. They're pretty thrilled with their schedule.
11:27Speaking of primetime games, I kind of guessed this too. And I'm wondering if my reason for guessing it
11:34is correct. But tell me why a 5-12 Washington team not only has five standalone nationally televised
11:42games, four of them in prime time, but also could potentially get flexed to standalone games
11:51on Saturdays late in the season. I think Tampa and Washington are the only two that that could happen
11:57to in both weeks 16 and 17. So, why the spotlight on a 5-12 team like Washington?
12:06I think a couple things. One, I know it was a little bit of a down year last year. Definitely
12:10some injuries impacting the team, unfortunately. But this team isn't that far removed from a run
12:15to the NFC Championship game. And frankly, a lot of the teams on their schedule, we felt like these
12:20were big games that warranted primetime windows. Not even starting with primetime, but starting with
12:25Philadelphia and Dallas in the first two weeks, those are Fox 425 doubleheaders in our biggest
12:30viewed window on Sundays. They are in plenty of big games throughout. And one that I can point to,
12:37if you remember from that 2024 season, there was an Atlanta at Washington game that was sitting in
12:42the week 17 TBD pool that actually got moved to Sunday night football, went to overtime, played an
12:48awesome game that was Washington clinching their first playoff berth in a few years. So, we definitely
12:53didn't shy away from them. We definitely think their schedule and the team warranted a handful
12:58of primetime games.
12:59Tell me about just what goes into those late week Saturday flex games and how you come up
13:07with the group of games that the league will eventually choose from to move.
13:12Part of it is an appearance count. So, we have certain obligations to our network partners,
13:17whether they be an NFC team on Fox or an ASC team on CBS. We need a certain minimum number
13:22of
13:22appearances on those networks. These teams also get filled in to Sunday night and Monday night and
13:27Thursday night football and the international games on NFL network, all these variety of windows.
13:32But we'll always have a handful of teams that have a couple appearances to spare. And we think
13:36that's a great opportunity to give the scheduling team that flexibility. I mean, if we're up to Mike and I,
13:41we'd love to put the entire back half of the schedule as TBD and every, you know, a few weeks
13:46in advance, we get to decide, oh, this has turned into a big game. Let's put it on this window,
13:50this window. So, that's really not practical, but this is kind of what we have right now. We're able
13:54to identify four or five games. This year, it's only four in the week 16 and 17 TBD pool. Decide
14:0012
14:00days in advance like we did with Washington Atlanta a couple of years ago. Hey, this game has played
14:05its way into a national window, whether it be one of the existing windows that we've set aside for
14:09Saturday, or they get flexed to Monday, Sunday, or Thursday night football. We really like having
14:14that flexibility, especially late in the season. Those games aren't played until December and
14:19January, and we're sitting here on May 15th trying to guess who's going to be playoff relevant. So,
14:23just having that flexibility is really, really impactful for the scheduling team.
14:26By the way, I noticed that the pool of games is smaller this year. Is that because both of those
14:31weeks are doubleheader games on Saturday, or are they tripleheaders?
14:36They're doubleheaders on Saturday. There'll be two games in week 16,
14:39and two and 17. Last year, we had a two-game week 17 Saturday, but we had five games in
14:46the
14:46pool. This year, we ultimately ended up with four. There's no rhyme or reason to it, really. But we
14:50really, I would say, emphasis not on the quantity of games in there, but the quality of games in
14:55there. And we feel like we have some pretty strong games throughout those pools.
14:58I thought, Max, there was a requirement for everybody to have at least one short week turnaround
15:05game. And yet, there are five teams, the Raiders, Jets, Cardinals, Titans, and Dolphins, who will play
15:12every single game until the end of the season. And Flex could play into it on Sundays without
15:18one short week turnaround game. When did that change? And how did you go about sort of just
15:24determining who would benefit from that? I know they're not in prime time. They're not in standalone
15:28games, but their schedule's a lot more consistent than anybody else's.
15:33Yeah. So initially, when that Thursday Night Football package was created, every team ended
15:39up on the schedule. There was a limit. You could play one short week. So when we only had
15:43those 16 windows, depending on how you count Thanksgiving and whatnot, we had to, we couldn't,
15:48we had to basically have every team fill out one of those games. After that season got the
15:53flexibility, allowing teams to play multiple short weeks, so long as they were spaced out,
15:58there weren't multiple of them on the road, things like that. So that's after that season,
16:02we were able to get the flexibility where you can have a team appear twice on the Amazon
16:06schedule. So there's a handful of teams, Baltimore, Denver, Green Bay, Houston, New England,
16:10Pittsburgh, that are going to appear twice on the schedule. We have that ability now as a
16:14scheduling team to put some of those teams I rattled off between Denver, Green Bay, Houston,
16:19New England, and Pittsburgh. Five of those were playoff teams last year. That's kind of our
16:23mantra around here is biggest and best games and biggest and best windows. So really trying to
16:28spotlight those teams we think are going to be competing for playoff spots in their divisions and
16:33whatnot. Really want to make sure we get those teams international windows. All right, let me give
16:37you my two gripes about this schedule in general. Number one is this. I mean, I love the NFL and
16:45I love
16:45college football. I understand why two years ago you had to play the Saturday games up against the
16:51first round triple header college football playoff games because Christmas was on a Wednesday and
16:56you needed those four teams to have ample time to turn around and play two Netflix games on Christmas
17:02day. But last year and this year, you could have passed on going head to head with the triple header
17:09on December 19th. Last year was December 20th with college football. Why has the league chosen
17:15to play games up against those college football playoff games? Truth is that is a weekend, a Saturday
17:24we played, I think it's something like 38 of the past 41 years. We've been on this weekend forever,
17:30the third Saturday in December when we play games. And do you remember we started, you nailed it
17:35correctly. We needed those teams to go from Sunday to Saturday to Wednesday to four in order to land on
17:41that Wednesday, Christmas, the first year. We had some success with that in the 24 season. We wanted
17:46to repeat it in 25. We actually worked with college football. Hey, how can we better stagger our game?
17:51So what ended up happening, if you remember commanders being in one of those games, we had college football
17:56play a game on Friday at eight o'clock and then another game Saturday at noon. Their next game started
18:02three 30 on Saturday. The NFL, we typically on these double headers will do like a four 30 and eight.
18:07We split it a
18:07little bit back. We started at five and eight 20 that gave college football a little more breathing room
18:12in the, uh, the earlier part of the day. We won, we played on this weekend so many times historically
18:18knowing college football is going to be on there. We definitely made a conscious effort with them to
18:21try and space, space that out. I just remember that first year being, this is a one-off because of
18:27the Christmas situation falling on Wednesday. And I thought you're right. The NFL's own that Saturday
18:33for as long as I've been a football fan. Um, and last year the NFL outrated in, in kicked college
18:41football's ass in part because the two college games that were going on simultaneously, uh, Lee
18:46were, were blowouts. And the best game was the first game, which was the Miami, Texas A&M game
18:51as a football fan though. I I'd rather not. I mean, look, I don't have a choice. I have two
18:56screens
18:57going anyway, but I'd rather not have to be focused on, um, both of them. The other
19:03thing, and it's not necessarily a gripe, it's just a curiosity last year, the, uh, wash Washington
19:10and Philadelphia after playing in the NFC title game the year before didn't play until the end
19:17of the season where they played twice in three weeks this year, the rematch of the NFC title
19:23game, Seattle and the Rams, you did the same thing where they're going to play twice over
19:28the final three weeks of the season. I remember saying to Mike last year, Max, the problem with
19:33that is there's risk that one or maybe even both games could end up being meaningless by the time
19:40you get there with Philly and Washington. They were meaningless because Washington was bad. Why that
19:46strategy with high profile NFC title game rematches with division teams waiting until the end to play
19:55the games. Truth is we really, really love having division games late. You know, you start the
20:01season, there are so many storylines that we can really hit on. There's kind of an inflection point
20:06in the middle of the year where it becomes less about the storylines from the off season, more into
20:10the current season and playoff races and whatnot that we love having those divisional games late.
20:15So we definitely try and backload the schedule a little bit with division games, especially with week
20:2018 being all division games. We like having division games at the end of the year. That's something where
20:25fans really start caring at that point about the playoff races in the NFC and AFC and they're all
20:30their divisions. We want to make sure we have games with playoff implications late in the season. So
20:35it wasn't necessarily forced that we put those in 16 and 18, but I do think, I know it's a
20:40little bit
20:40of a risk. Like you said, maybe it doesn't mean anything, but maybe it's similar stakes to that
20:44Thursday night football game. They played in week 16 last year, which ultimately got the Seahawks,
20:49the one seed, the Rams had to go there on the NFC championship on the way to Seahawks winning the
20:54Superbowl. So definitely like having division games late.
20:57All right. Two more. And I appreciate the time. The first is just Thanksgiving Eve.
21:02Obviously it's a revenue opportunity, another revenue opportunity. And I understand with the,
21:07you know, the ESPN NFL network merger and some of the games coming off the NFL network, et cetera,
21:14there were these games that were standalone opportunities for streamers. So I'm just curious
21:20as to what went into the thinking with respect to a night that typically has been a big family night,
21:28a big party night, the night before Thanksgiving. Um, I don't know that there's, you can play a game
21:34on any night or any day that it won't be watched. I think we're all addicted to it, but give
21:39me just
21:39some of the thoughts that went into playing on Thanksgiving Eve.
21:44Uh, one is like you said, kind of tying it to a lot of that family time when we spend
21:49a lot of
21:49Thursdays football fans watching those big games throughout the day. Um, and also some changes in,
21:55um, Nielsen measurement, better capturing out of home audience and just kind of having a lot of
22:00interest around these sort of tentpole games that we felt this would be a good window. That's
22:05frankly, a little bit of an experiment. It's usually college basketball and other things on that day
22:10that we felt that as being the NFL, we'd be able to certainly draw, draw audience to that new window.
22:15And of course, being the first time we're playing in that window, we wanted to put a strong game
22:19there. That's why you see green Bay and the Rams. So pretty, we think unique opportunity, but as
22:24like I mentioned at the start, really trying to put some better games into the Thanksgiving windows,
22:30similar thinking there, this is one of the big tent poles of the NFL season. What if we put a
22:35big
22:35game on Wednesday night leading into our usual Thanksgiving triple. When you said Nielsen out of
22:40home, you're talking about more measurement of what mass gathering watching? Absolutely. Yeah.
22:47All right. Last one, Chicago and Buffalo, both on Thanksgiving day and Christmas day. Is that
22:54something that teams have to approve? It is not. We typically best practice. We'll try, uh, we'll try
23:01not to have a team host on both days. So Dallas is an example from last year. They hosted on
23:07Thanksgiving,
23:07but they came and played at Washington. So a lot of these teams really love playing in these holiday
23:13windows, knowing how many fans being these big tent pole holiday events for the NFL, uh, how many
23:19people are watching. They love being in these, in these big windows. So not necessarily something
23:23they explicitly approve, but a lot of teams will reach out to us and are pretty thrilled to play in
23:28these holiday windows. And we'll definitely make a conscious effort not to schedule a, uh, um, a two home
23:35games for a team. We don't necessarily think that's fair for fans as well. Uh, so that's something we'll
23:39definitely take into consideration. Detroit's another example. They played on Thanksgiving last
23:43year. Of course they played at Minnesota on Christmas as well. Congrats. I know it's not easy. I know it's
23:49a
23:49lot of work. Um, but it's always fun to see what it looks like when we get there. And I
23:54appreciate the
23:55time. Uh, thanks for having me. It's great to talk about the schedule, especially with someone who
23:59understands it as well as you do. That was Max St. John from the league office, part of the team
24:05that puts together the NFL schedule, a couple of follow-ups to that conversation and then more NFL
24:12when we come back, Kevin Sheehan show, the team nine 80, the team nine 80.com. You can always listen
24:18to us by streaming the show at the team nine 80.com. You can download the Odyssey app and listen
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