Bills scheduling woes

[CodeMonkey]

Agreed but the randomness of teams like Kansas City and Buffalo being on the opposite ends of the spectrum in regards to playing teams with more rest suggests that NFL doesn't use that as 1 of its parameters.

With so few games to work with and profit being an extremely big motive, you may well be right if you mean they don't take after-the-bye into consideration at all.

[Delete This Account]

All you did here was ramble about nothing important (too much Red Bull/coffee?). Not only that, but I feel that your response was a bit beneath you as I've seen some pretty decent posts from you.

 

If you've read my posts I never said there was a conspiracy theory against the Bills, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that they can eliminate the discrepancies in the schedule... that's all pretty simple.

 

You talk about a schedule for Toronto like it's a big deal... you schedule the Bills 8 home games and then make one of them an NFC game in Toronto.... how damn hard is that? I mean it's not like its ONLY 2 hrs away (oh wait, it is!), and what is that in flight...? 20 mins? I can see the guys in the NFL scheduling committe now... "how in the HELL do we schedule that damn Toronto game?" "Holy hellfire Batman its... its IMPOSSIBLE without completely bending over backwards for the Bills... we have to take hotel space into consideration... oh wait it's Toronto, plenty of that... we need to think about weather... oh wait it's in a Dome..." ****, some to think of it, this Toronto game is pretty easy to schedule for!"

 

The money aspect, I already discussed (that you seemed to have ignored) in my previous post. I could care less about Prime Time games... those should go to the better teams because it is a money generating business. The only thing that I've had any contention with is the fact that there are some teams that will have to play 5 teams coming off bye weeks and those teams are negatively impacted by those games. No conspiracy theory here, and there's nothing to do about it this year, but I don't think it's a problem to bring up and try to rectify for future scheduling. Just make it as fair as possible.

 

it is a little harder in the bigger picture given the restrictions.

Bills and Toronto prefer the Toronto game be played after CFL season. Bills prefer it be a non-division rival, and preferably NFC team, which narrows the list down to 2.

Remember, this just isn't the Bills schedule, but the schedule has to work within the parameters of the visiting team.

And, the Bills want as few home games at Ralph Wilson Stadium after Thanksgiving as possible.

 

given those restrictions, suddenly there are a few more hoops the NFL schedule maker has to jump through.

 

the money aspect is important. forget prime time games. The Bills make more money when they have more games schedule before Thanksgiving, which leads me back to my original point.

here's a schedule in which the Bills stand to make more money by selling more tickets, and yet still has them complaining foul when last year's schedule was much less advantageous in the bigger picture based on home games after Thanksgiving and the number of opponents they faced coming off extended breaks.

 

jw

[Ralph W.]

http://blogs.buffalonews.com/press-coverage/2013/06/data-shows-bills-should-stop-whining-and-start-winning.html?ref=bmh

 

 

 

Looks like people can't cry this year.

[brucethomas34]

I don't have the time to check other teams schedules over the years but i'm sure we aren't the only ones with hard schedules...this is the NFL, every week is tough...

 

Regardless,

 

The buffalo bills are bowl bound!

[mitchmurraydowntown]

3 teams to take the over on total wins:

 

Kansas City, New England and New Orleans.

[Luxy312]

You may have a point. We can land a rover on Mars but creating a program to schedule NFL games is still likely decades away.

 

So who at NASA exactly is working for the NFL and why would that be more important? Sorry, but you're dumbing it down more and more with every comment bud. As Codemonkey said, there's only one way to make it fair. No bye weeks and no Thursday, Monday football. I'm sure the fans would go for that. Until then, the schedule harpies can just continue to cry in their cheerios.

Edited June 19, 2013 by Luxy312

[CodeMonkey]

http://blogs.buffalo...ng.html?ref=bmh

 

 

Looks like people can't cry this year.

People will cry every year.

[Best Player Available]

Hard for the team to complain when they happily put themselves at yet another scheduling disadvantage by adding an extra away game every year in exchange for a handsome pot of cash...

Brown, simply a paid Bills shill can complain about the "extra time" others have to prepare for games. yet The Bills sell off a home game and that isn't a competitive disadvantage? I prefer to call the TO game a "neutral site". game. Particularly when they play teams like the Steelers etc. And their fans fill half the stadium. Toronto has zero interest in the NFL as noted by price reductions, comped tickets, and most of all crap football.

 

Spare me the 4th largest market spin. Since again, Toronto other than the principals (money grabbing whores) could care less about seeing the Bills in a poorly designed stadium among other things.

 

The great Eric Wood says it best, since he has to work there once a year. "The Toronto series has pretty much turned into a joke. It didn't turn out the way we wanted, and I hope we don't renew it." Funny Chris Brown never reported that statement.

 

During the super bowl runs some media types reported how hard it was for the Bills to accomplish what they did because they played 3-4 extra games per season for years. The actual players didn't whine. Why? Because they were competitive, and winners (well except the last game of the year). Now the team whines because of some extra prep time in a schedule that MAY favor the opponent. Lately the pats* and most others could beat the bills on 2 days rest and prep. This sounds like a complaint better suited for competitive ballet. Looking forward to the kool-aid drinkers bringing this up constantly when the annual collapse arrives this year.

[2020 Our Year For Sure]

It's annoying and unfair that we've been screwed twice in a row, but it is what it is. I can see CodeMonkey's point, the NFL just has more important things to worry about when making the schedule. It doesn't bother them all that much that one team gets shafted in back to back years because they assume that in the long run, over a decade, things like that will come out in the wash.

 

Flip a coin twice and you might get heads twice in a row. Flip that sucker enough times and the ratio will even out.

 

Looking at it over a small sample size like two years, it seems unfair. At some point you gotta accept that that's just how stats/odds work, and win games anyway. Which I'm sure is Marrone and Brandon's attitude (I highly doubt this is something they told Frightened Lemur to write, much like his EJ Manuel mock draft in April). Hopefully the deck deals us better cards moving forward.

[Cash]

What should have been validated is how many times this has happened to a team in the NFL, say over the past 10 years, 15 years, 20 years (however long "bye" weeks have been around). If there is some statisical proof that this has happened to the Bills significantly higher than any other team in the NFL, then Chris Brown has a valid complaint. If this is just an anomaly, then the complaint is not valid. If it continues to happen, then Brown has a valid complaint. Without previous statistical data to back up Brown's claim, his complaint is invalid.

 

I disagree. Chris Brown's actual complaint boils down to:

 

1.) The schedule this year is unfair because some teams face a lot more rested opponents than others.

 

2.) Measures should be taken in future years to lessen that disparity.

 

3.) Extra attention should be paid to divisional games, and those should never have 1 team rested while the other isn't.

 

I don't really buy the divisional stuff, but I do agree with the first two parts (and did back when the schedule first came out and we had a long thread about it on here). No one really seems to be disputing the first part, just what the cause of it is. But my point is that it doesn't matter if it's just coincidence or if it's a massive league-wide conspiracy or anything in between. The point Brown is making isn't how this unfairness came to be, just that it exists. I personally tend to think that playing opponents off bye weeks is pretty random, because I doubt that the schedule maker looks at that aspect of it. But I don't know. Given some of the NFL's past scheduling shenanigans, I wouldn't be shocked if certain teams were protected and everything else was random. I would be shocked if the NFL was actually screwing the Bills over on purpose. What's the point? What's the motive? Doesn't make any sense.

 

As for Chris Brown's second point, that this issue should be corrected going forward, there seems to be a significant body of contrarians (led by JW and Tim Graham) who think that it shouldn't or can't be corrected, because they insist that it's extremely hard or impossible to build an NFL schedule without such drastic imbalances. I haven't yet seen any actual evidence offered up for this, just an a priori assertion that it can't be done. I don't buy it. Nor do I buy the counter-argument that since the Bills have specific scheduling requests that were met, it must then follow that they play 6 teams coming off rest, while the Patriots (and others) don't play any. Or that front-loading the Bills' schedule with home games necessitates playing teams coming off byes and Thursday night games. I don't see a connection there. If the Rogers Centre has limited availability, then maybe that's a real factor in terms of hamstringing the Bills' schedule, since the NFL is sorta-limited to only 2 potential opponents for that game. But I haven't seen anything suggesting that the Rogers Centre has limited availability.

 

If this complaint of the Bills' is so off-base and outrageous, how about proving it? Go through past schedules and find evidence that playing a bunch of rested teams is not a disadvantage. Or that 2013 is a massive anomaly and typically schedules are more balanced in this regard. (That one's hard to do, because we only have 2 years of consistent Thursday night games.) Or the media-types who are ripping the Bills could call up the NFL office and see what their response is. Maybe the problem is really that there's a ton of "blackout" dates at various stadiums because of concerts, etc., and this is really the best they can do. Again, I think it's just that no one in the scheduling office cares enough either to look at games against bye teams, or to change things if they do notice a disparity. If they did care, I'm pretty confident they could build a balanced schedule without jeopardizing any higher priorities.

[Doc]

So who at NASA exactly is working for the NFL and why would that be more important? Sorry, but you're dumbing it down more and more with every comment bud. As Codemonkey said, there's only one way to make it fair. No bye weeks and no Thursday, Monday football. I'm sure the fans would go for that. Until then, the schedule harpies can just continue to cry in their cheerios.

Looks like I didn't make it dumb enough.

[BuffaloBob]

funny that i missed this in reading the complaint story the first time. in the middle of it, there's a "related link," offering fans an opportunity to buy tickets for this season. i find this somewhat humorous:

 

Bills shake fist at NFL for unfair schedule (please buy tickets).

 

jw

 

I guess because the Bills aren't happy with what appears to be a legitimate fairness concern regarding an aspect of their schedule, they should not try to sell tickets for their games. Oh the irony!

[Cash]

http://blogs.buffalo...ng.html?ref=bmh

 

 

Looks like people can't cry this year.

 

It's a nice start, but I still don't think it's really relevant. Yeah, the Bills suck. What's that got to do with their schedule? The Bills had a favorable schedule in terms of rest in 2009 and went 6-10. Maybe if they'd had the same home/road opponents, but this year's unfavorable scheduling in terms of rest, they'd have gone 4-12. Maybe this year's team has the talent of a 8-8 team, but playing those teams coming off byes will cost them a win or two? A good second step would be to compare preseason over/under lines to actual performance. My guess is that you'd see a small but barely significant factor that suggests that playing a lot of rested teams hurts your win total. I think it's pretty complicated though, because some evidence suggests that playing a road game after a bye is a big boost, but playing a home game after a bye might not be any better than a regular home game. Also, the NFL schedule is so short, it's hard to get enough of a sample to really draw any conclusions. Not to mention the fact that over/unders and point spreads sometimes take things like bye weeks into account, and are sometimes adjusted to account for public tendencies (example: the Cowboys over/under always runs high, because there are a ton of Cowboys fans and they like to be on their team to win).

 

What is really nice about this piece is that it pretty conclusively proves that there is no anti-Bills scheduling conspiracy. These are pretty random results. The Bills' schedule luck was very middle-of-the-road in 2011 & 2010. They got lucky in 2009, and unlucky in 2012 & 2013.

[yungmack]

I recall someone raising this topic around here just a few months ago, and it covered several years of data. My memory is that the Bills consistently were scheduled against NE when NE was coming off a bye week, and never the other way around, with the obvious exception of the opening game (which, interestingly enough, is the one game where the Bills were competitive or actually won).

 

I think everyone around here would agree that the team with more time to rest and more time to prepare has an advantage. And obviously the opponent is at a disadvantage. I think most of us would also agree that putting a balanced schedule together is a difficult (but not impossible) task. But if one team is consistently playing its chief divisional after that rival has gotten more rest and preparation time, it begins to appear that the league is going out of its way to help one team over the other. If this has been the pattern over several years, as in the case of the Bills, then I think it is more than fair for them to raise the question of fairness.

[Luxy312]

Looks like I didn't make it dumb enough.

 

Really? If you can't provide the name of the program and it's just hypothetical, please let me know who on the NFL payroll helped get the Mars Rover into space and performing tasks on the planet surface. I'm waiting...

[bladiebla]

In all fairness this has been going on for years. It's never the Pats* that are on the short end of the stick.

 

Bottomline is the NFL needs to make a set of rules, then have a computer make the schedule.

 

1. A team coming off a bye always plays another team that is coming off a bye.

2. Teams having changed timezones play each other.

3. Teams that have played a thursday night game will have to travel timezone next game.

4. Teams coming off a monday night game will play next game at home.

 

There, should be workable.

[BuffaloBob]

Really? If you can't provide the name of the program and it's just hypothetical, please let me know who on the NFL payroll helped get the Mars Rover into space and performing tasks on the planet surface. I'm waiting...

 

This is just a plain stupid argument. There are University PHd programs around the country that are rooted in scheduling/routing theory. This is WELL KNOWN. You don't need a commercially available scheduling software program from Microsoft or Intuit to do this sort of thing.

 

It is a simple matter of prioritizing the scheduling parameters. There are thousands of academic papers published on scheduling/routing algorithms and heuristic methods implemented in software for calculating solutions based on those algorithms. I would bet my life that the NFL has software that they use to at the very least establish a first pass schedule for all teams, and then a way to go in and alter certain parameters and re-run the program as needed until they end up with the final schedule.

 

This is in fact, NOT rocket science, nor is any required.

Edited June 19, 2013 by BuffaloBob

[Doc]

This is just a plain stupid argument. There are University PHd programs around the country that are rooted in scheduling/routing theory. This is WELL KNOWN. You don't need a commercially available scheduling software program from Microsoft or Intuit to do this sort of thing.

 

It is a simple matter of prioritizing the scheduling parameters. There are thousands of academic papers published on scheduling/routing algorithms and heuristic methods implemented in software for calculating solutions based on those algorithms. I would bet my life that the NFL has software that they use to at the very least establish a first pass schedule for all teams, and then a way to go in and alter certain parameters and re-run the program as needed until they end up with the final schedule.

 

This is in fact, NOT rocket science, nor is any required.

Thank you.

[BuffaloBob]

So who at NASA exactly is working for the NFL and why would that be more important? Sorry, but you're dumbing it down more and more with every comment bud. As Codemonkey said, there's only one way to make it fair. No bye weeks and no Thursday, Monday football. I'm sure the fans would go for that. Until then, the schedule harpies can just continue to cry in their cheerios.

BUT, I hate to see a smarta$$$$$ wait, so hear ya go! http://www.fico.com/en/FIResourcesLibrary/NFL_Success_2495CS.pdf

[BillsWatch]

Once again NFL apologists say 'you need to be screwed because you are terrible (maybe one of them is just a new troll) or you need to be screwed because you complained about schedule in previous years. It appears they want the Bills to use JW's half box of used tissues and wipe their butt after being screwed by NFL - there is no excuse for this type of schedule when NFL wants 'parity'. Even if it was bad one year it would be different other years. Sorry to be crude but someone needs to tell NFL it has no pants.