NEW YORK — On the fifth floor of the NFL’s Park Avenue offices in Manhattan, there is a small, rectangular room with frosted glass. You cannot see inside with the stainless-steel VAL PINCHBECK ROOM sign on the outside, and you cannot enter without a keycard. With good reason: This is where four men assigned to sift through more than 500,000 schedule possibilities worked almost every day (including from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Easter Sunday) for the past 10 weeks until completing the 2014 NFL schedule Tuesday night. No one without permission enters but them.

Not even the cleaning people at night. Three hours before the schedule was announced Wednesday, there was a garbage can in one corner of the room overflowing with Vitamin Water bottles, Pepsi cans and Starbucks cups. Across the room: an industrial-strength shredder with the remnants of the schedules that didn’t make the cut. The NFL offices are white-glove tidy, but this place … not so much. As the four men of the schedule did their post-mortem, and shared it with The MMQB, it was a little gamey in the room. That’s what happens when four men and 40 computers work for 70 days to invent what they hope will be a 256-game masterpiece—but which they know will bring charges of favoritism and cronyism from teams, TV networks and stadium operators.

This year, NFL senior vice president of broadcasting Howard Katz and his team had the following roadblocks to the schedule you’ve bitched and moaned about since last night: a combined 17 games in non-traditional slots—Thursday CBS/NFL Network games, Saturday NFL Network games, and a Sunday morning FOX game (Detroit-Atlanta, from London)—as well as six One Direction concerts at NFL venues in the fall, New Zealand rugby team the All Blacks playing at Soldier Field on Saturday of Week 9 (the NFL won’t risk a bad-weather rugby game ruining an already-iffy field for a Bears game the next day), and baseball. The joke in the room late Wednesday was the NFL would have to root against the Phillies all summer, because the Eagles are home on potential baseball playoff weekends on Oct. 5 and 12. Lord help the league if the Pirates get hot in October—because the Steelers are home Oct. 20 and 26. And it’s not neighborly to fool with the World Series.

http://mmqb.si.com/2014/04/24/making-of-2014-nfl-schedule/ 

Peter King  wrote: