League Working with Mathematicians for Fairer NFL Schedule

A team of mathematicians is working with the league on finding ways to make the NFL schedule fairer.

The University of Buffalo research group is led by Mark Karwan, Ph.D, a professor of operations research. The group were awarded a three year research grant by the NFL in November 2018. While confirming the deal, the league did not comment further.

Any NFL fan will be aware of the potential unfairness and difficulty that lies within each new NFL schedule. Long road trips, weeks without a divisional matchup and games against teams with a rest advantage can be unfair on teams.

The idea that these things all even out over time is comforting, but ultimately not true.

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The project was inspired by the Buffalo Bills, who were proved by research to be consistently disadvantaged by the NFL schedule.

The Bills complained about how often they played teams either coming off a bye or a Thursday night game. The research showed that between 2002 and 2014, Buffalo, had twice as many of those games as some other teams. Thus proving that if left unchecked, the schedule can be inherently unfair on some teams.

However, solving it is no easy task. With stadium limitations, television partners and much more to consider, a model based on fairness is difficult to implement.

“This is a field I’ve worked in for 46 years, including 43 as a professor,” Karwan said.

“I’ve worked on very difficult problems that take more than 12 hours on the supercomputer to solve. And this is by far the hardest any of us have ever seen.”

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While fans are unlikely to notice a huge improvement in the fairness of their schedule, there are other advantages. Karwan’s Ph.D student, Zach Steever, explains:

“The hope would be that you notice it in the quality of the games,” he said.

“Every team knows its opponents before the schedule comes out, but where you place them in the schedule matters. If you create a schedule that minimizes, say, long trips on short weeks or evens out the rest disparity, those kinds of things can factor into quality of the play.”