David Rosenthal

And that trust is what closes deals.

That is a lot of time back for their engineers to focus on growth.

Any given Sunday.

So Burt and the NFL do two things.

First, he completely overhauls the way the schedule works.

So in the past, the schedule would be just like, yeah, whatever, you know, we're all going to play each other, you know, in random order.

he realizes that the schedule is actually an incredibly important strategic lever.

And he looks at the results from last year's season and arranges the schedule such that the weaker teams from last year play the other weaker teams for the first half of the season, and the stronger teams from the previous season play the other stronger teams for the first half of the season.

So that way, he can come as close as possible to guaranteeing that

roughly everybody's going to have statistically a relatively even 50-50 record going into the midway point in the season.

So there's going to be drama about who's going to end up winning, even though the actual level of talent might diverge quite a bit within the league.

And the NFL still does this to this day.

Yeah, this is like a kind of critical sleight of hand in making the whole thing work.

But this is kind of like camouflaging.

If there is a competitive balance problem underlying everything, this is only camouflaging it.

How do you fix it?

Well, there's no free agency at this point.

I know, which is ridiculous.

And so the NFL and Burt come up with the idea of having a draft of college players and not just any draft, but a draft in reverse order of where you ended up in the standings in the previous season so that the worst teams in the league get the first picks for the next season's draft.

And it's incredible the artifice that grows up around this.