RAMS 2017 SCHEDULE
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If you look carefully, all those Times are PST. Not EST, as most people usually list start times!
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Hey Mikey! First, you are correct about someone somewhere being tired of their crap. That cracked me up! Also, attendance, if the Rams show even a tiny bit of promise, there will be 85,000 people there per game, 90% Rams fans. If the season isn't going well, there are still a lot of die hards (best guess Rams fans are about 60,000-70,000) that show up regardless of the standings but then you can almost count on 20,000 opposing team fans when the team isn't in the running. The Los Angeles fan base is so fickle with the Rams when they don't play well. The Chargers, I only know 1 Chargers fan of about 100 people I connect with and she isn't happy they left SD. I don't see them getting a lot of love in So Cal at the moment.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/04/21/nfl-2017-schedule-howard-katz-roger-goodell
How the 2017 NFL Schedule Was Made
The slate wasn’t finalized until a computer in western Europe spit out option number 52,129, which accounted for marathons in Detroit and Chicago, turned Los Angeles into an odd focal point on New Year’s Eve and made teams playing overseas happy with their byes
by Peter King
From l. to r., Charlotte Carey, Howard Katz, Blake Jones and Michael North
Photo: Eric Espino/NFL
This is the fourth straight year I’ve done a story on the making of the NFL schedule. Each year, I speak to the four-person team of schedule-makers, led by NFL broadcasting and schedule czar Howard Katz, after the hay is in the barn . . . sometime late in the day after the schedule is finalized.
But this year I feared the jig was up. At 12:22 a.m. on Monday, Katz emailed to say there was a long way to go before the schedule would be finished—and he wasn’t feeling very confident. On Monday afternoon the scheduling team presented to Roger Goodell one iteration of the tens of thousands spewed from nearly 400 computers that looked quite good; Goodell thought the schedule was good enough to play, but also thought three teams’ slates had minor flaws, and that the Los Angeles TV schedule had holes.
Back to work. On Tuesday at 11:05 p.m., a few hours after returning from the funeral for Pittsburgh owner Dan Rooney, Katz sounded even more pessimistic about an optimal schedule getting done in time for the projected 8 p.m. ET Thursday release.
But a breakthrough happened while the schedule-makers slept. At 2:21 a.m. on Wednesday, schedule number 52,129 shot out of a computer and fixed the four problems Katz & Co. hadn’t been able to get over—making three team schedules less arduous, and giving the Los Angeles market better doubleheader games.
“Making the schedule is always a balance,” says senior director of broadcasting Mike North, who has worked on the annual three-month schedule marathon for 19 years. “In this case, how much of what we liked about the schedule could be kept intact by addressing teams X, Y and Z, plus the TV games with the two L.A. teams now? In this case, we were able to fix the problems without creating others.”
The winning schedule, remarkably, was spit out of a computer in western Europe. But more about that later.
For now, as I examined the work of the schedule-makers, five headlines stand out:
The Raiders are back. Oakland had one prime-time game in 2015, and two in 2016. This year, the Raiders have the NFL max of five prime-time games, plus four doubleheader games that will be nationally televised. The league will be in a TV mess if the Raiders are not the emerging star team they appeared to be at the end of 2016.
“Most years,” said North, “you count on seeing Dallas, Green Bay, Pittsburgh and New England in prime time a lot. This year you’ll get five Raiders games and four doubleheader games, meaning more than half their games will be on national TV. It’s been a long time since that’s happened—maybe a generation.”
Odd slate for the Pats. A predictable opener, versus Kansas City on Thursday night, Sept. 7, to start the season. (If you wonder why no Atlanta there, it’s simple: The Falcons wanted to open their new stadium in Week 2 at home, and the combination of the new venue plus being the defending NFC champs meant that would be a huge Week 2 game.
Thus, Green Bay at Atlanta on Sunday night in Week 2 . . . the league also wouldn’t put the Falcons in the league’s marquee game in Week 1 and 2.) But after New England’s Week 9 bye, the Pats play five of six on the road, including back-to-back games in altitude, at Denver and against the Raiders in Mexico City, in Weeks 10 and 11.
Lots of coast-to-coast trips made the schedule harder to formulate. The NFC East plays the NFC West and AFC West this year. The AFC West plays the AFC East and NFC East this year. The Chargers have two trips to the Meadowlands. Washington has two trips to Los Angeles. The Raiders have five games in the Eastern Time Zone.
The Raiders will play east in Week 1 (Tennessee), Week 3 (Washington), Week 8 (Buffalo), Week 9 (Miami—Oakland requested one back-to-back eastern swing) and Week 16 (Philadelphia), on Christmas night.
No bye weeks until Week 5. Might seem like a minor thing, but since the NFL went to 16 games played on 17 weekends, the byes have regularly started in Week 4. Teams prefer to have their bye closer to the middle of the season. This year, no team has a bye in the first four weeks.
No flex scheduling in Week 16. NBC has Minnesota-Green Bay on Saturday, Dec. 23, then Raiders-Eagles on Christmas night, a Monday. Those games are set in stone, so teams (and fans) won’t have to wonder 13 days before the game if it might be moved to a different time.
One of the strangest things about the 2017 NFL schedule: All four California teams will be playing in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. The Raiders are at the L.A. Chargers, and the 49ers are at the L.A. Rams. Both games kick off at 4:25 p.m. ET. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. It’s just odd.
In the past, things like a Papal trip to Philadelphia, a huge international rugby game in Chicago and various concert tours have derailed the work of Katz and his team, which includes North and two new members: director of broadcasting Blake Jones and broadcast manager Charlotte Carey. There were not many unique events this year to derail the schedule.
The World Junior Hockey Championships in Buffalo put the Bills on the road in Weeks 16 and 17 (the Bills were fine with it), while marathons in Detroit and Chicago made the Lions and Bears unable to play at home, respectively, on Oct. 8 and Oct. 15. “The start/finish lines in those races are in the parking lots of those two stadiums,” North said. “If we could avoid it, we needed to.”
Every team’s going to have some anger about some parts of its schedule, to be sure. “But we’re throwing away schedules, lots of them, we would have used 10 years ago,” said Katz. “One weekend, the computer spit out 297 schedules we considered playable. We threw them all in the garbage because they had flaws we weren’t willing to accept. But they would have been acceptable before.”
Some of the reasons seem quirky to most people, but they aren’t that way locally. The Bengals had been in a tizzy because they had been assigned to open seven straight seasons on the road. This year, their 50th season, they strongly requested a home game in Week 1. Thus, they’ll open the season the same way they closed 2016: at home, against the Ravens.
Three of the teams playing London in Weeks 3 and 4—Baltimore, Jacksonville and Miami—asked the league to avoid giving them byes the following week. One team in London, New Orleans in Week 4, wanted to follow the overseas game with a bye. All four teams got their wish.
“One of the issues people wouldn’t expect,” said Katz, “is that we’ve got 10 teams playing international games this year—eight teams in London, two in Mexico City. Most of those teams have a request as to where they want to be before that game, or after that game.
So that’s something else to add.” The Rams, for instance, wanted to play in Eastern Time the week before playing in London against the Cardinals on Oct. 22 . . . and so the league put the L.A. Rams in Jacksonville on Oct. 15. The Rams will practice in Florida for a couple of days before going to London.
* * *
When Goodell initially saw the first iteration of the schedule his group found acceptable, Katz said the commissioner was “generally complimentary.” But one of the problems Goodell and the schedule-makers couldn’t get over was that one NFL club (Katz wouldn’t say which) had a three-game road trip, which included a trip to the opposite coast, followed by another road game. They would have played the schedule. They didn’t want to play the schedule.
Katz calls North “our computer-whisperer.” When Katz’s group had problems with the three teams and the Los Angeles TV schedule, North refined what he was asking the computer on Tuesday night. The NFL uses two primary software partners, Optimal Planning Solutions of Vernon, British Columbia, and Gurabi Optimization of Boston.
As North explained, the available servers used by Optimal or Gurabi in the cloud could be in Europe, Asia or some American city. And when he checked the time stamp Wednesday morning of schedule possibility 52,129, it was five hours ahead of New York—meaning on some computer in western Europe.
“It’s a remarkable concept,” North said, “compared to actually having the machines physically in the office. It wasn’t that long ago that we only had a dozen we used. Now I wish we had another 1,000.”
And it wasn’t that long before that when the NFL had a couple of humans, led by longtime director of broadcasting Val Pinchbeck, make the schedule by hand—and by trial-and-error. There’s a lot to envy about the old days in the NFL, but making the schedule is not one of them.
How the 2017 NFL Schedule Was Made
The slate wasn’t finalized until a computer in western Europe spit out option number 52,129, which accounted for marathons in Detroit and Chicago, turned Los Angeles into an odd focal point on New Year’s Eve and made teams playing overseas happy with their byes
by Peter King
From l. to r., Charlotte Carey, Howard Katz, Blake Jones and Michael North
Photo: Eric Espino/NFL
This is the fourth straight year I’ve done a story on the making of the NFL schedule. Each year, I speak to the four-person team of schedule-makers, led by NFL broadcasting and schedule czar Howard Katz, after the hay is in the barn . . . sometime late in the day after the schedule is finalized.
But this year I feared the jig was up. At 12:22 a.m. on Monday, Katz emailed to say there was a long way to go before the schedule would be finished—and he wasn’t feeling very confident. On Monday afternoon the scheduling team presented to Roger Goodell one iteration of the tens of thousands spewed from nearly 400 computers that looked quite good; Goodell thought the schedule was good enough to play, but also thought three teams’ slates had minor flaws, and that the Los Angeles TV schedule had holes.
Back to work. On Tuesday at 11:05 p.m., a few hours after returning from the funeral for Pittsburgh owner Dan Rooney, Katz sounded even more pessimistic about an optimal schedule getting done in time for the projected 8 p.m. ET Thursday release.
But a breakthrough happened while the schedule-makers slept. At 2:21 a.m. on Wednesday, schedule number 52,129 shot out of a computer and fixed the four problems Katz & Co. hadn’t been able to get over—making three team schedules less arduous, and giving the Los Angeles market better doubleheader games.
“Making the schedule is always a balance,” says senior director of broadcasting Mike North, who has worked on the annual three-month schedule marathon for 19 years. “In this case, how much of what we liked about the schedule could be kept intact by addressing teams X, Y and Z, plus the TV games with the two L.A. teams now? In this case, we were able to fix the problems without creating others.”
The winning schedule, remarkably, was spit out of a computer in western Europe. But more about that later.
For now, as I examined the work of the schedule-makers, five headlines stand out:
The Raiders are back. Oakland had one prime-time game in 2015, and two in 2016. This year, the Raiders have the NFL max of five prime-time games, plus four doubleheader games that will be nationally televised. The league will be in a TV mess if the Raiders are not the emerging star team they appeared to be at the end of 2016.
“Most years,” said North, “you count on seeing Dallas, Green Bay, Pittsburgh and New England in prime time a lot. This year you’ll get five Raiders games and four doubleheader games, meaning more than half their games will be on national TV. It’s been a long time since that’s happened—maybe a generation.”
Odd slate for the Pats. A predictable opener, versus Kansas City on Thursday night, Sept. 7, to start the season. (If you wonder why no Atlanta there, it’s simple: The Falcons wanted to open their new stadium in Week 2 at home, and the combination of the new venue plus being the defending NFC champs meant that would be a huge Week 2 game.
Thus, Green Bay at Atlanta on Sunday night in Week 2 . . . the league also wouldn’t put the Falcons in the league’s marquee game in Week 1 and 2.) But after New England’s Week 9 bye, the Pats play five of six on the road, including back-to-back games in altitude, at Denver and against the Raiders in Mexico City, in Weeks 10 and 11.
Lots of coast-to-coast trips made the schedule harder to formulate. The NFC East plays the NFC West and AFC West this year. The AFC West plays the AFC East and NFC East this year. The Chargers have two trips to the Meadowlands. Washington has two trips to Los Angeles. The Raiders have five games in the Eastern Time Zone.
The Raiders will play east in Week 1 (Tennessee), Week 3 (Washington), Week 8 (Buffalo), Week 9 (Miami—Oakland requested one back-to-back eastern swing) and Week 16 (Philadelphia), on Christmas night.
No bye weeks until Week 5. Might seem like a minor thing, but since the NFL went to 16 games played on 17 weekends, the byes have regularly started in Week 4. Teams prefer to have their bye closer to the middle of the season. This year, no team has a bye in the first four weeks.
No flex scheduling in Week 16. NBC has Minnesota-Green Bay on Saturday, Dec. 23, then Raiders-Eagles on Christmas night, a Monday. Those games are set in stone, so teams (and fans) won’t have to wonder 13 days before the game if it might be moved to a different time.
One of the strangest things about the 2017 NFL schedule: All four California teams will be playing in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. The Raiders are at the L.A. Chargers, and the 49ers are at the L.A. Rams. Both games kick off at 4:25 p.m. ET. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. It’s just odd.
In the past, things like a Papal trip to Philadelphia, a huge international rugby game in Chicago and various concert tours have derailed the work of Katz and his team, which includes North and two new members: director of broadcasting Blake Jones and broadcast manager Charlotte Carey. There were not many unique events this year to derail the schedule.
The World Junior Hockey Championships in Buffalo put the Bills on the road in Weeks 16 and 17 (the Bills were fine with it), while marathons in Detroit and Chicago made the Lions and Bears unable to play at home, respectively, on Oct. 8 and Oct. 15. “The start/finish lines in those races are in the parking lots of those two stadiums,” North said. “If we could avoid it, we needed to.”
Every team’s going to have some anger about some parts of its schedule, to be sure. “But we’re throwing away schedules, lots of them, we would have used 10 years ago,” said Katz. “One weekend, the computer spit out 297 schedules we considered playable. We threw them all in the garbage because they had flaws we weren’t willing to accept. But they would have been acceptable before.”
Some of the reasons seem quirky to most people, but they aren’t that way locally. The Bengals had been in a tizzy because they had been assigned to open seven straight seasons on the road. This year, their 50th season, they strongly requested a home game in Week 1. Thus, they’ll open the season the same way they closed 2016: at home, against the Ravens.
Three of the teams playing London in Weeks 3 and 4—Baltimore, Jacksonville and Miami—asked the league to avoid giving them byes the following week. One team in London, New Orleans in Week 4, wanted to follow the overseas game with a bye. All four teams got their wish.
“One of the issues people wouldn’t expect,” said Katz, “is that we’ve got 10 teams playing international games this year—eight teams in London, two in Mexico City. Most of those teams have a request as to where they want to be before that game, or after that game.
So that’s something else to add.” The Rams, for instance, wanted to play in Eastern Time the week before playing in London against the Cardinals on Oct. 22 . . . and so the league put the L.A. Rams in Jacksonville on Oct. 15. The Rams will practice in Florida for a couple of days before going to London.
* * *
When Goodell initially saw the first iteration of the schedule his group found acceptable, Katz said the commissioner was “generally complimentary.” But one of the problems Goodell and the schedule-makers couldn’t get over was that one NFL club (Katz wouldn’t say which) had a three-game road trip, which included a trip to the opposite coast, followed by another road game. They would have played the schedule. They didn’t want to play the schedule.
Katz calls North “our computer-whisperer.” When Katz’s group had problems with the three teams and the Los Angeles TV schedule, North refined what he was asking the computer on Tuesday night. The NFL uses two primary software partners, Optimal Planning Solutions of Vernon, British Columbia, and Gurabi Optimization of Boston.
As North explained, the available servers used by Optimal or Gurabi in the cloud could be in Europe, Asia or some American city. And when he checked the time stamp Wednesday morning of schedule possibility 52,129, it was five hours ahead of New York—meaning on some computer in western Europe.
“It’s a remarkable concept,” North said, “compared to actually having the machines physically in the office. It wasn’t that long ago that we only had a dozen we used. Now I wish we had another 1,000.”
And it wasn’t that long before that when the NFL had a couple of humans, led by longtime director of broadcasting Val Pinchbeck, make the schedule by hand—and by trial-and-error. There’s a lot to envy about the old days in the NFL, but making the schedule is not one of them.
Ram65
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Great video of the guys getting the schedule. Demoff getting really grey. The Jax game and then London makes it a little easier for travel. Then the break and the Giants for more travel. Don't like those London games. Still looks like a hard schedule again.
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Well on a side note just took a look and the presale tix suck (location wise)
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http://www.espn.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/234722/2017-nfl-strength-of-schedule
2017 strength of schedule figures, based on opponents' winning percentage in 2016
Rank/Team....................../W-L.............../%
17.../Los Angeles Rams/123.5-132.5/ .482
2017 strength of schedule figures, based on opponents' winning percentage in 2016
Rank/Team....................../W-L.............../%
17.../Los Angeles Rams/123.5-132.5/ .482
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http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...s-hosting-simultaneous-nfl-games-three-times/
Los Angeles hosting simultaneous NFL games three times
Posted by Curtis Crabtree on April 20, 2017
Getty Images
Three times this year the Los Angeles metropolitan area will host two separate NFL games at the same time.
On September 17, the Los Angeles Rams will host the Washington Redskins at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in a 1:25 p.m. PT kickoff while the Chargers are hosting the Miami Dolphins in a 1:05 p.m. PT kickoff at the StubHub Center.
On December 10, the Rams host the Philadelphia Eagles in a 1:25 p.m. PT kickoff while the Chargers play at 1:05 against the Redskins. Both teams finish the regular season at home in Week 17 on December 31 as well. The Rams host the San Francisco 49ers with the Chargers playing the Oakland Raiders. Both games kickoff at 1:25 p.m.
It’s a unique situation for the NFL to manage until the opening of the new stadium in Inglewood in 2019. The Coliseum and StubHub Center are 12 miles apart. The distance between the two stadiums should help alleviate some traffic overlap issues with the games.
While the Jets and Giants share the New York market, they play in the same stadium. The only time the Jets and Giants can play simultaneously in New York is when they are playing each other once every four years (preseason excluded). The Los Angeles reality of the next two season creates these unique scenarios where the Rams and Chargers are home the same weekend.
Outside of those three weeks when the teams play at the same time, the Rams and Chargers aren’t playing in Los Angeles the same week the rest of the year.
I find this very curious and almost started a dedicated topic to discuss it.
Saw this bit from another article saying about the same thing;
http://www.espn.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/235733/winners-losers-of-2017-nfl-schedule-release
In their first season together in the Los Angeles market, the Rams and Chargers will play at the same day and time for nearly half of their home schedules. It's difficult to know what to make of that odd occurrence.
Is the NFL confident that each team will carve out its own fan base quickly enough to avoid limiting support on those parallel game days? Do they know that it will be a long climb, especially for the Chargers, regardless of the schedule? Or do they realize it is simply a temporary circumstance that will end when the teams move into the Rams' new stadium in 2019?
The answer is probably a combination of those factors, but in the big picture, it is a reminder of how jumbled this arrangement is and will be for a couple of seasons.
Both teams will kick off in the 1 p.m. local time window in Weeks 2, 14 and 17. The Rams will play in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a cavernous 93,000-seat stadium that was perhaps half-full for games by the end of last season. The Chargers will play 12 miles away in the StubHub Center, a soccer stadium that will seat 30,000 for football.
The size of the Chargers' home crowd might make traffic logistics a little less relevant. But from a big picture, the NFL has put the limited number of Los Angeles football fans in position to choose between teams for three of the eight weeks. The Chargers already have sold out their season tickets, so it's going to be a lot easier to find a seat for a Rams game at the Coliseum. It's not the crime of the century, but it is far from ideal and indicative of the NFL's herky-jerky return to the country's second-largest market.
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Nice avatar!
Rams vs Colts week 1
Luck and Goff both #1 overall QBs and from rival colleges (Cal and Stanford)
Luck and Goff both #1 overall QBs and from rival colleges (Cal and Stanford)
PARAM
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Seems like quite a difference from last year's .550. That's a difference of .068. Almost the difference between last year's S.O.S. going into the season (.550) and last year's S.O.S. at the end (.504) of .048. It equates to a a difference of +7.8 wins on the schedule (over this year's sos) over last year and -7.7 wins on the schedule (last year's ending sos). So not really much difference between the two (last year's ending SOS and this year's starting SOS). In other words, an +.068 difference for a team over 16 games is about +1 win while an +.048 is +3/4 of a win. A 1/4 win difference.
We play 3 games against teams with terrible records (SF twice with 2 wins and Jax with 3 wins). Last year the lowest win total we faced (going in) was 5 wins (SF). We have 5 games vs playoff teams while last year we had 6. We have 9 games vs teams with 7, 8 or 9 wins. Last year we had 4. We have just 4 games vs teams with double digit wins while last year we had 7. It all will change from the starting winning percentage and the ending winning percentage.
And of course we will have a hand in each. But what does it say that last year's opponents actual win percentage dropped by .048 from the beginning to end of the season and we only had 4 wins? We sucked!!!
Mackeyser
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Week 6 the Rams are playing at Jacksonville. What date is that?\
Also, I like the lack of prime time games. A solid schedule without the need to deviate will help us focus on execution, not altering the schedule every week to play at different hours/on different days.
Also, I like the lack of prime time games. A solid schedule without the need to deviate will help us focus on execution, not altering the schedule every week to play at different hours/on different days.
PARAM
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True. A co-worker of mine was touting the fact his Eagles had 5 prime time games. I responded with 'well, that's ten weeks winning is going to be more of challenge. The week of the game and the week after'. Not surprisingly, he didn't see it that way. But that is reality.
If you're a very good to great team, less difficult. If you're middle of the pack- hopeful to be a contender (in the opinion of the schedule makers), more difficult. If I were a coach of a very good team, I wouldn't want more than 2 or 3 prime time games.