Okay, you’ve got 30 teams, 240 games, 17 weeks with one bye for each club, five television networks, two two-team cities, and 10 teams sharing stadiums with Major League Baseball.

Now, make a playing schedule and keep everybody happy.

Sound like a daunting challenge? It’s that and more. You can see the results for the upcoming season in this edition of NFL Report. What you won’t see is all the mental anguish that accompanies the annual construction of the schedule.

The man in charge of the process is Val Pinchbeck, our longtime chief of broadcasting. He is assisted by Broadcast Department colleagues Dick Maxwell and Joe Ferreira. Aided by a computer, our schedule-making trio disappears into a small room in our offices in February, pausing periodically to eat and sleep, and emerges about six weeks later with a schedule. The group works nights and weekends through the myriad variables that go into the equation.

The task is simplified to some extent by the NFL’s common-schedule formula, which automatically determines every team’s opponents. Eight of every team’s 16 games are home-and-away matchups with division rivals. Four interconference games are against teams in a division of the other conference, scheduled on a rotating basis. The four remaining intraconference games are determined by last season’s standings.

So Pinchbeck & Co. don’t have to worry about the who and where, only the when. But that leaves a mind-boggling puzzle to solve.

For example, two teams in New York in the same stadium plus two teams in the Bay Area (49ers and Raiders) equal numerous potential conflicts. The dual-team cities thus have to be scheduled in tandem. Other key variables: stadium availability, especially for the 10 NFL teams sharing stadiums with baseball, bye weeks for every team, and weather conditions such as early-season heat in Arizona and late-season cold in Green Bay.

Several competitive factors add to the complexity. For example, attention is given to spacing the home-and-home division games so that rivalries such as the Cowboys and Redskins are not completed in the first month of the season. Other restrictions include no team playing more than three Monday night games per year, no team playing more than three consecutive weeks at home or on the road, and every team making at least one prime-time appearance.

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The computer is a considerable help, but there are many factors that have to be considered manually, including wish-lists submitted by the clubs and networks. "One of the great misunderstandings is that the networks or clubs have some say in the schedule," says Pinchbeck. "Once we’ve received the initial input from everyone, there is no more dialogue. The clubs don’t have the right to come back and ask for changes. The same with the networks."

And when it’s completed, how does Pinchbeck feel?

"It’s kind of a personal satisfaction," says the man involved in every NFL schedule since 1971. "It has to be that way. Nobody calls to congratulate you for putting the schedule together."

Hey, Pinch, congratulations! It was another job well done.