Q&A on the News

Q: Does the NFL purposefully manipulate matchups, such the recent game between Denver and Indianapolis? With only 32 teams, the odds of playing every team over several years is probably high. It seems a lot of matchups feature former coaches and players who have recently changed teams.

—Tom Cotton, Senoia

A: Matching marquee players and teams is one of the factors that go into the arduous NFL scheduling process, which regularly lasts from January to April every year. There is a basic formula that is used to build the 256-game regular-season schedule. Every team must play every other team in its division twice (six games), four teams from a division in its conference on a rotating basis (four games) and four teams from a division in the other conference on a rotating basis (four games). There are also two more intraconference games that are based on the previous year's standings. Many other factors go into scheduling, including Monday Night Football, Thursday night games, appeasing the networks — — CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and NFL Network — baseball playoffs, travel, bye weeks, blacked-out dates for stadiums, three Florida teams that often don't want to play 1 p.m. games in the heat of September and October and two New York teams that don't want to play home games during the Jewish High Holy Days, according to The New York Times. A computer program and members of the NFL staff, led by Howard Katz, often examine 14,000 combinations from a possible 824 trillion game combinations, the Times reported, before deciding on the final schedule. The process led Katz to tell the Times: "This is the annual ritual of finding out how stupid I am."