 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship room. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the road. Just heard the keynotes. It was interesting format, Jeff. IBM chose to put the keynotes in the middle of the day on day one. Normally, of course, they're in the morning. They have the main tent at 7.30 or 8 o'clock in the morning, but today, sort of midday, so it was an interesting break. Mike North is here. He's the senior director of broadcast, planning, and scheduling. The guy who does the scheduling for the NFL is here, Mike. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. So, interesting topic, the business of football, how data is changing football, but before we get into that, talk a little bit more about your role in the NFL. Sure, I'm coming up on my 20th year with the National Football League. I started in the internet group back in 1994, and back then, nobody had email addresses, nobody had a website, so it was a lot of missionary marketing, trying to convince people, hey, computers can play a role in sports. Well, about 15 years ago, I switched into the broadcasting department, and I'm part of the team that helps make the playing schedule every year. You know who plays whom, based on where you finished in last year's standings, and also a rotation that we use. But as far as who plays when, that's on us. We work with our network partners, and we work with all 32 teams to figure out who plays on Monday Night Football, who plays on Sunday Night Football, who goes to London, who's on Thanksgiving, who's on Christmas. It's an obviously interesting exercise. Every team in the league hopes to open the season with a home game, close with a home game, have a week 10 by, play every game, Sunday afternoon, one o'clock. If they have to play in prime time, it's got to be a home game. Well, obviously that's not possible, so it becomes an exercise really in pain management. Everybody's got to take a little bit of pain, hopefully we dole it out fairly. So I had to, before we get into that, so you were on the internet, you were head of internet division, back in 1994, the World Wide Web, it was just a year old, I didn't realize the NFL was- No, brand new. Actually, a quick funny story, when the NFL went to launch its website for the very first time, NFL.com was taken. There was a podiatrist in Chicago who was squatting on the website or using it supposedly under the acronym, No Foot Loss, NFL. So that first year, when we launched the website, it was actually at NFLHome.com. And then a year later, I believe we worked out a deal with that gentleman. I think he ended up with Chicago Bear Season Tickets for a year. And- That's all it cost? That's all it cost. Wow, fantastic. Yeah, I wonder if people made that decision. Dummy's over there. Okay, so talk a little bit about the scheduling nuance, because I'm from New England, Eastern San Francisco, so we watch Bob Kraft's sort of angle, likes the cold weather, right? So you got all kinds of competing agendas. How do you level the playing field? You try to be as fair as you can to everybody. I mean, all five of our network partners, which now encompass six television packages, because CBS added a new primetime package this year. They've got the first eight Thursday night games in addition to their Sunday afternoon package of AFC games. Fox has a Sunday afternoon package. NBC has Sunday nights. ESPN has Monday nights. They all want the same games. So just imagine you're a New England Patriots. They play the Denver Broncos this year. You want that game? So Peyton Manning versus Tom Brady, that is game A1 every year. What do you do with that game? Do you put that game on Sunday night football on NBC? Do you put that game on Sunday afternoon on CBS? Wouldn't that game be a nice feather in the calf for ESPN on Monday night football? Do you do that on the Thursday night for CBS this year launching a new primetime package? What do you do with that one game? Multiply that decision by all 256 games. How do you maximize the value of each one of those matchups throughout the entire season? So do you essentially place of some kind of value on each game? Well, that's what we're trying to do, as Jeff and I were talking before we came on. Five years ago, this notion of moneyball, if you will, or sports analytics was brand new to everybody and was really kind of dismissed by most of the traditional media and traditional front offices. But what we're looking at now is trying to figure out that Denver, New England game is worth something on NBC. Let's say it's worth a 12.3 rating on NBC on Sunday night football. It might be worth an 11.2 rating on ESPN on Monday night football. It might do a 19 on a Sunday afternoon on CBS and a double header window in December in the snow with both teams fighting for a playoff spot. What's the right use of that one game? And then whatever decision you make, you've now left a hole. If you don't put it on CBS and put that 19 rating on December on CBS, what are you going to put in there for CBS that day to make up for those ratings points? How do you get all five network partners and all six television packages to deliver maximum ratings? It's very soft, it's a lot of soft issues and kind of what feels like a basic kind of a math problem. And Dave, I don't know, before we were talking, there used to be a couple, a married couple that used to do the whole MLB schedule up until only a few years ago on paper. So by hand. By hand. By hand, the National Football League not that long ago was still building this schedule manually. But I would think the NFL, Mike, is at least you can quantify it because, I mean, so much of the revenue, I'd say so much of the revenue, but more of the revenue than, say, in baseball is TV, right, because you have so fewer games whereas baseball is more gate, I presume, right? So you can at least, as you're given the ratings, and I mean, somebody at the back end can quantify that. Well, that's the challenge. How do you take the soft issues, take the moneyball aspect of this thing? Each of these games is going to generate X-many eyeballs, but also you have to keep in mind the fact that at the end of the day, it's not just about the television ratings. This is still professional sports league and it's the play on the field that matters more than anything else. If we wanted to build the mythical perfect NFL schedule, whatever that was for our television partners, you could do that, but your New England Patriots might have a three game road trip which includes a road Monday night game in New England and your San Francisco 49ers might have back to back cross country trips and open the season on the road and not be able to open their new building on Sunday night football in week two. What's the cost of delivering maximum ratings in exchange for not being able to deliver competitively fair schedules to our clubs? That's not a trade we're willing to make. By the flip side, you could deliver 32 extremely fair television, extremely fair competitive schedules. Everybody, you know, no more than two games on the road. Nobody plays a road game after a road Monday night. Nobody has to play teams coming off their bye more than one or two weeks in a row, things like that. All the things that a coach or a general manager might look for, you could have a very fair 32 team schedule. Is that going to be your best television? Where's that balance? That's what we're looking for. Trying to figure out how to be fair at all 32 and all five and you really can't be. So it's spreading the pain around and everybody's going to be a little disappointed. Hopefully nobody too disappointed. And you still have Jacksonville, right? So they want to play everything at home now in Wembley Stadium. But they're doing like two, right? They're playing one game in Wembley Stadium this year. They're in the third year of a four year commitment to take one game each year over to Wembley Stadium. That in and of itself brings a whole load of challenges for us. Where are you the week before you go to London? Where are you the week after you go to London? Teams come back from London to their bye week, which limits then where that bye can be scheduled throughout the season. We've got three London games this year. One on week four, one on week eight, one on week 10. And each of those six teams have to be very carefully managed. Where are they the week before? Are they in London the week they're committed to and do they have their bye the week after? And those six teams, those six decisions somehow impact the Monday night game in week five and the three game road trip for the Titans in week 14 and whether or not we can have the right Fox doubleheader game in week two. London's really interesting, right? Because you got the, I would imagine most coaches don't want to go to London, but the owners are interested because it expands the league, but some may not be. That's really the balancing act that all 32 of our teams have to make, you know, that decision for themselves every season. I mean, you said it right, the head coach, Sunday afternoon, one o'clock every week of the year. No question about it. But the owner and the vice president of marketing, right? Somebody put their name on that stadium. Levi's put their name on San Francisco 49er Stadium. They're hoping for some prime time exposure, right? The owner wants to see his team, his national brand. You were mentioning the Cowboys earlier and that big beautiful stadium and that video board. Sunday afternoons at one o'clock is one thing. Sunday nights and Monday nights and Thursday nights, that's a whole nother animal. So each club really has to make that distinction for themselves, then come to the league with a request, series of requests and priorities, and then the league office has to determine the best way to dole out that prime time exposure. I could go forever and ever. In the Niners, we thought the Niners for sure would be at Seattle for the opening, right? The Super Bowl champion always opens up, thought for sure the political rival, but we got the curveball bracketing the Niners first ever Thanksgiving game with Seattle in the three of, or two of three weeks. So it seems like, oh, a pretty simple decision. That was actually step six or eight of 40 decisions that had to be made in order to get us to that point. You start like you say with the Seattle Seahawks opening at home for the kickoff game, that Thursday night game. You first look at their eight home opponents and which of those might make the most sense. You're looking for obviously competitive football game. You're trying to reward teams that have quote played their way on the prime time. And you're also trying to decide what's the best use of that one game? That's San Franciano game. It's really an asset, right? It's an asset. It's an asset. So what's the best way to deploy it? That Thursday night kickoff game is gonna deliver a pretty monster number no matter who plays in that game. Do you wanna quote waste one of your San Franciano games? It's become maybe the fiercest rivalry in the league right now. I was gonna say something. Or you supercharge it. Yeah. Right, that's great. That's the whole question. We're talking sports with Mike North. He is involved and very heavily involved in the scheduling and NFL. Mike, how does technology play into helping you squint through all this and how has it changed in the past few years? It's changed significantly. These past 10 years of monumental strides forward. Like we said, really almost 10 years ago still, we were still mostly building this schedule by hand. You make a decision about the kickoff game and you put that tag there and you're gonna play this game on Thanksgiving and let's put this one here and these guys have to go to London and let's say this one for December, hope it snows and you hang about 30, 40, 50 games up and then you try to solve around those 40, 50 games. Really doing it by hand, building sequentially. You get through week one, two, three, four, five. You get to about week six and you realize, oh, we're not gonna finish week six. Unless we go down here and we get that Miami Jets game that we had earmarked for Monday night football in week 14. Well, the only way to finish week six is to play Miami against the Jets. So you take that game out of week 14, you put it in week six, you solved one problem and now you've created a hole in your Monday night football schedule. You are compromising your television package just because you couldn't move forward in week six. Who knows what decision you made that led you and trapped you into that box. So now we have a piece of software that helps us build that seed schedule, build the infrastructure really, the guts of the schedule. We partnered with a company out of Western Canada called Optimal Planning Solutions and they helped us teach a piece of software. Here's the 20 games we're willing to see on Sunday night football. Here's the 30 games we're willing to see on Monday night football. Here's a handful of options for Sunday afternoon, for Thanksgiving, moving around however you need to but put them in a way that at the end of the day when you solve around it, all your games are in the spots you want them. That's the software side. The big move in the recent years has been on the hardware side and that's part of the reason we're here thanking our friends from IBM for their generosity and lending us really each year the latest and greatest. How many cores can we cram into each box? What kind of clock speed can we get into those boxes? We're talking about 60 core machines with 3.2 gigahertz of clock speed now. When you hit that button and you said, go find me the best schedule, we can get through the solution space now so much quicker than we ever could before. We had one or two or three machines and they had four cores or eight cores. Now we're talking about lining up eight, 10, 20, 40 machines. The bigger they are, the faster they are, the more options we're gonna be able to look at and find that mythical optimal schedule. Then you run like a simulation, right? You plug it in, runs you, it comes back out. Finished schedule, completely built, top to bottom, analyze it. Who's got the worst schedule? Who's got the best schedule? Is this a good Monday night schedule? Did the games fall where we wanted them to? Which teams have issues? Three game road trips, multiple cross country trips, games on the road against teams coming off thereby. All the things that the coach or general manager might look at and say, hey, that's not fair. And then you look at it from all five television network standpoint. You don't want the president of Fox to look at his schedule and say, hey, wait a minute, why did all of my good games end up in prime time? You gotta spread it around for everybody. So you run the schedule, you make some decisions, you change some rules, you change some constraints, alter some priorities, run it again, run it again. So it bought you time to iterate all day? Where as we do it by hand, you ran out of time, you burnt out. When we did it by hand, we'd finish one schedule in 10 weeks. We'd hand it to the commissioner, we'd say it's the best we got. Here's who's going to be really, really angry with you and your phone's going to ring. Talk a little bit about on the data side, because you've got the great perspective because you've been there for so long. And like you said, there wasn't a lot of data involved early on yet. Dinners at the commissioner's house and barbecues and everything else. I'm curious in terms of fantasy and really the fan participation that was driven in fantasy and the demand for data to drive that and how that's really kind of pushed the league along. I mean, now obviously they're running big computing things because anytime anyone does something, now it's the first time anyone's had a combination of two first downs, 60% passing percentage and a touchdown since so-and-so in 1962. I mean, talk a little bit about how that really has evolved within the league. It's really changed the way fans ingest the game. I mean, we were talking earlier about how it's one thing to reach them on their phones or on their tablets, because nobody really just sits in front of their television for nine hours on a Sunday, though we try to make it worth their while to do so. There's a few of them out there. But now when you're watching the game, to your point, the statistics, they're instant, right? When was the last time a rusher did this? When was the last time this quarterback did that? It used to be the kind of thing where something happens in the second quarter, you send some kid behind the curtain and he's culling back through papers and index cards and God knows what. And then here we go, middle of the third quarter, the announcer comes back and says, hey, that incredible thing we saw an hour and a half ago, here's the last time it happened. Now you're getting that information instantly. And the switch, not the switch, the growth really of fantasy football, what it's done as much as anything is it makes every game mean something to somebody. And they all do. Every play, even. Every play, right? I mean, we only play 16 games, so you want to talk about every moment counts. It's true, every game matters and the league recently with all this parody, you're talking about everybody sort of starts out with a baseline of eight and eight. You're talking about one or two plays in a game that tilt the needle to whether or not you win or lose. And now you're talking about nine or seven or 10 and six. 10 and six puts you in the playoffs. Six and 10 means you fire your coach and you've got a top 10 draft there. The margin is so slim and it plays out on the web, on radio, on television, everywhere that the fans are trying to ingest the game. It's a nonstop source of things to talk about. Yeah. And the other fascinating thing is the business value that it's unlocked. I mean, we were joking the other day. I mean, the NFL draft is a two hour business meeting that's now on prime time and they talk about it for months. But to your credit, it is for the NFL Network now even has a schedule show. When the schedule comes out, they talk about it for two or three days. So the actual business value that's been extracted by building entertainment value around these other assets that aren't the game has been amazing. Well, it just goes to show you the value of the software and the hardware and the analytics and the big data. If we were doing a poor job of creating this playing schedule every year, I'm not sure the fan interests would be as big, certainly about the release of the schedule when it comes out in April, but also over the course of the entire season, you can't play your 10 best games in week one and then have the rest of the season sort of devoid of those big monster matchups. Any football fan can look at the 256 games for next season and pick the 10 or 15 must see matchups. I'll give you a great example. We're looking ahead to 2015 already. That's the season that will culminate with the Super Bowl 50. So the 2015 season. The one at Levi's Stadium. At your building. Exactly, I'll see you there. That season will culminate with Super Bowl 50. So the entire season is going to be a celebration of all of these Super Bowl rematches that are going to be played throughout the 2015 season. Oh, that's awesome. Well, what happens if they all end up in weeks one and two, then you're devoid of that storyline for the rest of the season. So our job, take this already difficult problem, the London and the Mondays and the three game road trips and everything else, now add into it next year, spreading out all these Super Bowl rematches so we can have a story to tell, hopefully every week of the season, hey, here's the big Super Bowl rematch this week. It might be on Fox, it might be on CBS, it might be on Monday Night Football, but we've got a season long theme going throughout the entire year and we're still trying to manage everything else. That's fantastic. What's the last we've got up against the time? We could go all day. Get in the hood, we could go all day. What's the current party line on the long gated schedule, the 18 game schedule? As a football fan, I'm all for it. Oh yeah, sure. As a season second holder, you want to get rid of those. I think that the visceral reaction from the players and it's not an unfair one. We talk a lot about player health and safety and even in our schedule, we're always trying to manage. We're playing these short weeks now where you play Sunday to Thursday, every team in the league plays a Thursday game. Where are you the week before your Thursday? Where are you the week after your Thursday? How long has it been since you've had your Thursday game at home? And should your bye week be far enough away from your Thursday so that you get a little mini break after your Thursday game and you get that full week off from your bye? So we're very cognizant of the player health and safety issues in our 256 game schedule. A 288 game schedule will be a real challenge, I think. I think you'll probably see playoff expansion before you see regular season expansion, but our fans have made it pretty clear that trading two preseason games for two regular season games, heck, where do I sign? Yeah, I'll sign me up for that. Like you guys, I mean the gold standard of certainly sports in America, so congratulations on the great work. We really appreciate it as fans. All right, keep it right there, everybody will be back. We're live from IBM Edge and this is theCUBE, we'll be right back.