With the NFL going to a 17 game regular season schedule in 2021, KRFL will also change to a 17 game regular season schedule in 2022.
Our current 16 game schedule has been used for many years. It has each team playing the other teams in its division twice (6 games), playing one game against six of the eight teams in its same conference (6 games), and four games against team in the other conference. For the most part it has worked well, except I have long been frustrated by teams having long stretches of either road or home games. For example, this season I play three straight road games to begin the season. Since we use a "home field advantage" of three points, I've always wanted a more balanced schedule of home vs. road games.
I think I have accomplished that after spending a few hours created the new schedule templates for the 17 game schedule.... Of course with a 17 game schedule, it means each team will play 9 home games and 8 road games one season, then 8 home games and 9 road games the following season. But I think I have it all figured out (I will likely have Excel/Schedule guru Roberto Tosco check my work) and no team would play more than two straight home or road game and that should only happen once per season. However, to make it work I had to change who each team plays each season....
Instead of playing six of the eight teams in other divisions in its conference, each team would play all eight teams of those teams. And each team would play three games against teams in the other conference instead of four. I'd like to play more inter-conference games, but with 17 games and three divisions in each conference, it just makes the scheduling so much more difficult and leads to those situations of three home or road games in a road. The other change is, again to keep a team from having to play three home or three road games in a row, the three inter-conference games will need to be played during weeks 12, 13 and 14. So the first 11 games would be playing the other 11 teams in your conference. Then 3 games against teams in the other conference. The final three games (weeks 15, 16 and 17) would be against the other three teams in your own division.
Assuming the majority of you do not have an issue with this, I am going to go with it.
I trust your thinking completely. I think I can speak for the membership of the league in saying your stewardship as commissioner is exemplary. I am most impressed that you are already on top of this.
Ugh! After auditing the schedule, it does not work because the template I downloaded from the internet did not have the proper home vs. road game set up for the intra-conference games, and it would be too much of a mess to try to straighten out manually.
So, we may be back to simply adding a 17th cross-conference game to the existing schedule which mean three straight home or road games will occur. More work todo....
It appears the best solution will be to add another inter-conference game to the existing schedule as the 17th game. I like that because then we get to a team we likely have not played in a couple years. So that is the way it will be handled next season.
