The process of building the NFL schedule used to be a painstaking one with executives spending months slotting the games one by one on a board until there was a final product for the commissioner to approve. Making late tweaks or looking at alternative options with a big game moving from early to late in the season weren’t really possible for all the pieces of the complicated jigsaw puzzle to fit. The 272-game schedule the NFL released this year took a completely different journey to completion with computers from Amazon Web Services negotiating the trillions of possibilities and officials at the league looking at more than 80,000 of them before making a final choice.
