Alternate History Sports / Full Season Scheduling Formulas for Football

**Posted by austin-gud** 12/18/2020 1:06 pm

Hi everyone, I've been working on football scheduling formulas for 18 game football seasons, over 19 regular season weeks, so I can create schedules for Gridiron Uniform Database Simulation League (GSL).
In case someone might find them useful, I'm going to share a read only version of my scheduling spreadsheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V-jVQ8iMFSIRGfevjr_7COZMRYTY52JxSTYS0EZuQSg/edit?usp=sharing

There's a few things I've got so far. First, is how double round robins can be played in 4 and 6 team divisions. Next, I have scheduling formulas for 18 games season over 19 weeks, with leagues that have 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24 teams (thus far). I figure for leagues 26 teams or more, schedules can be mapped to past NFL seasons.

The last few sheets are actual game schedules by week. The formatting may look a bit odd, but it matches what I need to create the schedule in the database for the GSL.

I'm not sure if this will be useful to anyone, but if anyone plans on scheduling full seasons worth of games, this should help. Having the division round robin formulas should also help when creating schedules for leagues of different size as what I have, since these schedules follow similar patterns.

**Posted by Steelman** 12/19/2020 2:43 am

Hey Austin, welcome to the boards. Thanks for sharing! We appreciate everything you guys do over at GUD.

**Posted by Stickman** 12/19/2020 9:18 pm

Steelman wrote:
Hey Austin, welcome to the boards. Thanks for sharing! We appreciate everything you guys do over at GUD.

I'd personally love to second this, as a long time fan of GUD, glad to see you on these boards!

**Posted by MyTeamIsDr.Pepper** 12/20/2020 2:29 pm

Stickman wrote:
Steelman wrote:
Hey Austin, welcome to the boards. Thanks for sharing! We appreciate everything you guys do over at GUD.
I'd personally love to second this, as a long time fan of GUD, glad to see you on these boards!

And I'll third it. GUD is a fantastic resource and one of the biggest aides in pulling off a football league like I do. Thank you for all the work you do. I'm happy to see you've made your way here.

**Posted by austin-gud** 3/03/2021 4:14 pm

I have somewhat of an update on this, for anyone who again, may find this useful.
I've been writing a Python script that will generate a schedule for a 32 team league (as I plan to expand the GSL to 32 teams for the 2022 season). This script, right now, can generate a fully randomized schedule for all teams, that meets certain rules, like, not playing the same divisional team twice in a row, and not twice in the first 4 weeks. It also randomized bye weeks, for each team. The script can also rotate which divisions play which other divisions in the league, based on year.
I still need to work on scheduling home and away games for each team, and this should depend on divisional rotation (as in, with the NFL, an AFC team will alternate home and away games against an NFC team over 8 years).
I think it would be good to also give the script the ability to have games on a predetermined schedule (for example, the Lions always play on Thanksgiving at 12:30).
I don't have game times in this scheduling script yet, but that's easy enough to do by hand. Randomizing opponents while following matchup, and home and away rules is the hard part.
Once I get the 32 team league down, I could try to adapt the code to many other sized leagues.

Once I've got this whole script completed, I'll put it in a public git repository, with a readme file with instructions, so that anyone can download the source code, and run it to generate schedules. I think I'm still a ways off from being done, but it's something I've got in the works that hopefully helps someone out.