Max St. John is the NFL manager of analytics schedule planning for the NFL.

He's part of the small group that works to put together the NFL schedule.

Mike North, Max St. John, a couple of others.

These are the guys that are locked in a room for several months, putting together the

NFL schedule, which came out in its entirety on Thursday night. Max, join me on my podcast on

Friday. And I started off by asking him about whether or not the guys that put this thing

together get frustrated that the thing gets leaked in the days

preceding the official announcement, really on the day of the official unveiling, gets leaked

at times in its entirety. I mean, most of us knew Washington's schedule in its entirety before the 8 p.m. official league release.

Does that frustrate the guys that put this thing together? Here's what he said.

First of all, thanks for having me. Great to be on. We are obviously not a big fan of the leak,

but truth is we need to get this information out to everyone before the official release date.

So kind of going back a few days, we got final approval on our schedule at noon on Tuesday.

From there, it's kind of starting to paperwork, getting the press releases, the team schedule is ready.

The teams found out starting at 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. So at that point,

they had their full schedule. They could get everything ready for for ticketing, for the social

media unveiling, all that good stuff. Thursday, we reveal it to our network partners.

So there is a good, you know, 24, 36 hours where the schedules are out. And as that kind of gets

passed along, unfortunately,

you know, some people are able to pick it up and see some schedules, something we definitely

try and limit, but it's just kind of a factor of how things work in terms of just getting

the teams and the networks, the games ahead of the full release. So I guess we probably limit it as much

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