Ask Farmer: How does the NFL create the regular season schedule?

Have a question about the NFL? Ask Times NFL writer Sam Farmer, and he will answer as many as he can online and in the Sunday editions of the newspaper throughout the season. Email questions to: sam.farmer@latimes.com

How does the NFL put the schedule together? It seems like it would be a complicated process. Some matchups are mandated and I am sure there are non-conference games that are selected because they will draw a good audience. Can you put these two factors and several others into the computer and let an algorithm complete the schedule?

Gary Olson

La Cañada

Farmer: It’s an extremely complex process, one that consumes several months of the offseason. The complicated part isn’t who is playing who — there’s a formula and rotation for that — but how the schedules are arranged, when teams get their off week, which games are distributed to which networks, etc. With 256 games, 17 weeks, six time slots and four possible days — Sunday, Monday, Thursday and Saturday — there are hundreds of trillions of potential schedule combinations. The NFL has as many as 255 computers around the world running 24/7 for nearly four months to find the closest possible match to the ideal slate of games.

Among the scheduling elements that are factored in now, but weren’t deeply considered when the league used to construct the schedule by hand: How much is a team traveling, and how far? Is someone playing a road game against a team coming off its off week? Is anyone playing a road game six days after being on the road on a Monday night? Is a club overloaded with consecutive opponents who made the playoffs the previous season? Has a team gone multiple seasons with its bye at Week 5 or earlier?

The NFL’s schedule-making team consists of Howard Katz, senior vice president of broadcasting, and three fellow league executives. One of those executives, Michael North, sums up the process thusly: “Imagine you’re looking on the beach for the best grain of sand. Your best hope is to drop as many people as you can on that beach, and drop them in all different places. Because you have no idea where on that beach the perfect grain of sand is.”

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Is there a designated home team in the Super Bowl?

Susan Perry

Del Mar

Farmer: Yes, even though no team has played a Super Bowl in its home stadium. (The Minnesota Vikings are hoping to become the first at the end of this season.) The home team in the Super Bowl alternates from AFC to NFC. The Atlanta Falcons were the home team last season, and the New England Patriots were the visitors, meaning it’s the AFC’s year for Super Bowl LIII.

Although largely symbolic, there is one advantage to being the home team: It gets to choose whether it wears white or colored uniforms. Bizarrely, 10 of the last 11 Super Bowl winners were wearing their white uniforms, with Green Bay over Pittsburgh the lone exception.

sam.farmer@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATimesFarmer