What makes a "good" schedule?

The measure of a schedule's goodness or quality has many different, sometimes conflicting, aspects. The following lists some of the issues QuickScores.com takes into account when creating a schedule.

  In a round-robin league, each team plays every other team the same number of times. In a fractional round-robin league, such as eight teams playing a ten-game season, a team may play some opponents more often than other opponents, but there will never be more than one game difference.

  All teams are distributed equally across the available game days and times. No team has a disproportionate number of early games or late games, nor weekend games versus weekday games.

  Total flexibility in terms of when and where a league plays, meaning a league can play on multiple days, fields and times, and no day-field-time selection affects any other day-field-time selection.

  All teams have the same number of home and away games.

  If a team plays multiple times in a week and the league plays on multiple days, that team's games should be distributed across the days to minimize the chance of a double-header on a particular day. If a team must play two games on the same day, those games should be on consecutive time-slots and on the same field.

  In leagues with odd numbers of teams, optionally replace the byes in early weeks by moving up games from late weeks. This not only minimizes the number of byes (every team wants to play every week), it shortens the season as much as possible and leaves the maximum number of bye games at the end of the season for rain-outs.

  No games are played on specific days, such as national holidays.

  Flexibility in terms of games per week, such as teams playing one game per week for part of the season and two games per week for the rest of the season. This includes varying the number of games per week in order to stretch the season out to a particular desired end-date.