The process of building the NFL schedule used to be a painstaking one with executives such as Val Pinchbeck spending months slotting the games one by one on his board until there was a final product for the commissioner to approve.
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The 272-game schedule the NFL released on Wednesday took a completely different journey to completion with computers from Amazon Web Services negotiating the trillions of possibilities on what day, what time and what network to play each game and officials at the league looking at more than 80,000 of them before making a final choice.
"Now because we've got all the automation, we've got all the hardware, we've got basically 5,000 Vals," said Vice President of NFL Broadcast Mike North. "Instead of Val building one schedule by hand. We've got 5,000 computers each building up schedules. So we've got 5,000 Vals out there."
The NFL moved from the manual board from the old days to rooms full of servers that the league had to purchase and configure. Then in 2017, the league contracted with Amazon to use cloud technology to make the schedule, taking advantage of Amazon's technology which uses predictive analytics to help make a more ideal schedule for TV partners.
The deal allowed the NFL to access more computers at a cheaper cost because Amazon does most of the work during off hours when demand for its cloud service is low.
