Back on the podcast so happy to be joined this week by the senior vice president of NFL broadcasting

Howard Katz and the vice president of NFL broadcasting Mike North.

They've just finished an arduous process. You know I've written about this, which is the

NFL schedule, I've written about this and a couple of people have said how hard can

making a schedule be? And I said well I don't know because

I've never done it but I've been inside the room and I've seen the what basically a well used room scheduling room at NFL headquarters looks like and

smells like so I yeah and smells like that's good Howard but anyway I really appreciate you guys

being on and look I thought that what we would do and the best way to sort of frame this is and Howard either you or Mike would be

fine to answer this.

Can you just sort of give me a broad brush look at how the process begins, when it begins,

and how it develops over a four month span.

I'll take a crack at it and Mike can add in.

The process begins right when the regular season ends and we know all of the opponents, right?

There are a couple of games that are standing space.

So once we know that, Mike begins to load into the computer all the games.

And this year is a little tricky because we weren't sure when we began the process whether we were going to play a 16 game 17 week schedule or a 17 game 18 week schedule so that was a little tricky

We right around the Super Bowl

meet with all of our broadcast partners.

And CBS and Fox basically tell us the games

that they most want to keep on their schedule.

And NBC and ESPN give us the games that they would like to see on their

schedule. And generally those lists are pretty similar.

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