In a compact office in Vancouver, Rick Stone and colleagues at Optimal Planning Solutions help solve some of the biggest puzzles in sports, helping put together game schedules for the likes of the NFL and Major League Baseball.
In the early 2000s, Stone had a vision that he could use his software skills to help sports leagues figure out when and where teams would play. Many leagues at the time were still assembling their schedules by hand or with a spreadsheet.
“I originally was doing manufacturing scheduling, and so I took the same skills and software that we used in manufacturing scheduling some 20 years ago and just started applying it to sports scheduling,” Stone said.
Stone says the once the NFL season is over, the league’s schedule-makers quickly begin work on determining the next season’s slate of games.
“With the NFL, at this point, our contribution is really just to support the software. So we’ve built the software for them.”
Their software works on a schedule that takes a whole lot of computing power to finalize the league’s 272-game schedule.
“There are more combinations of NFL schedules than there are grains of sand on the planet. They’re running three to four thousand 16-core CPUs 24/7. So they have a warehouse of computers that are solving these schedules every day for four months.”
One of the things that make setting the NFL schedule so difficult is factoring in the league’s television partners.
“The biggest thing that the NFL is after is how do we get the most eyeballs onto our product?” Stone said.
“We’ve got a limited number of assets, games — 272. So they’re trying to figure out what are their very, very best games of the 272, the most compelling games, and get them on in the slots that they think that can get the most people watching their games.”
So how did a little company from B.C. become a teammate for about 30 sports leagues around the world?
Stone got his first sports job by volunteering to put together a schedule for a semi-pro hockey league in the U.S.
“And it went from there — a lot of word of mouth, a lot of cold calls,” Stone said.
Eventually he gathered enough knowledge and experience to garner the attention of the NFL.
“They just happened to be doing a request for proposals to a number of large American consulting companies and said, ‘Well, sure, go ahead, throw your name in there.’ And so we did and we ended up winning the bid. We beat the NASAs and the KPMGs and those types of corporations.”