The process of building the NFL schedule used to be a painstaking one with executives such as Val Pinchbeck spending months slotting the games one by one on his board until there was a final product for the commissioner to approve.
Making late tweaks or looking at alternative options with a big game moving from early to late in the season weren't really possible for all the pieces of the complicated jigsaw puzzle to fit.
The 272-game schedule the NFL released on Wednesday took a completely different journey to completion with computers from Amazon Web Services negotiating the trillions of possibilities on what day, what time and what network to play each game and officials at the league looking at more than 80,000 of them before making a