I tried to take as many factor into account as possible, if I were to do it again, I'd probably pay more attention to the 2 Thursday games. While I tried to spread the marquee matchups throughout the season, there are a couple of weeks where that's lacking also. Having said that, I wasn't too worried about it because I know the league will develop it's own storylines as the season goes on. What we think will be a big matchup now, may not be the case, conversely, you may see something like Tampa vs St Louis in week 8 being huge.MikeMitchell wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 4:54 pm Not bad Shooter. It will probably take some time to inspect your mock schedule further. It's not easy to schedule an 8 team league for 10 weeks. You need home and home for the divisional matchups and two separate home and road games for non divisional opponents.
Knowing you Shooter, you probably accounted for everything. Even still, it's difficult to keep everything lined up.
Your issue with teams having long road stretches or playing teams multiple times in short spans, is hard to avoid when making an 8 team schedule. You find this out when you sit down and actually try to do it. Especially when you to attempt to backload home schedules for northeastern teams.
The unknown factor is venue scheduling. You have to work around that as well. We don't have that info available, but it changes things if you know that a particular team can't be at home on certain weeks. Like Tampa. as a small example, during WrestleMania week. (Week 9)
Those Thursday night games late in the season are interesting. You almost want to make sure that the teams that end up playing on the short week, are playing on the Saturday prior, rather than Sunday. From a competitive side, if you are a playoff team. You kind of want to get that last Thursday game of the regular season. It will give you extra time to prepare for the playoff matchup nine or ten days later.. That's boring football stuff but coaches and teams care about getting any advantage they can.
It's possible that the league doesn't set the week 9 and 10 game times, just to give them the flexibility, to flex to a more desirable game for their prime time network games.
One thing I did focus on was the stadiums, DC, Dallas and LA have the smallest stadiums, so I wasn't too worried about their attendance. Houston's capacity is 40,000 and I think it's possible to get close to that number in attendance if they have a decent team. I knew week 1 would be well attended, so I put the least desirable matchup there (TB). There's nothing I could do about the 3 division games, but I did send NY to Houston as their second inter-division game. As the largest City in the US, there are a lot of people spread throughout the country with ties to NY. Same thing with New York, I scheduled Dallas (obvious NFL rivalry) and LA (second largest city).
As far as scheduling Thursday teams early for the week before, It didn't work out for both teams in week 9, but I was able to at least give the road team an extra days rest. If I could only give it to 1 team I figured the road team should get it since they have travel to deal with. Week 10 worked out, as LA was scheduled for the previous Thursday night game also, and St Louis was scheduled for Saturday's game.