It’s really a simple matter of saving time, Dave Brown says. When he worked at ESPN as the lead college football scheduler, he saw the deficiencies in the system. How it depended on one program calling another, then another, then another, until it found a match. Or, as it often happened, saving as much time as they could by calling him.

ESPN had their own rudimentary program for scheduling called the Path System. Brown thought it was effective, but with some better code and the right improvements, could be made better.

“I just wanted to see if we could reduce what could take hours into minutes, basically, and/or seconds,” Brown said.

So, in August 2015, he left ESPN and created Gridiron. The website serves a niche industry — the college football scheduling world — but counts 88 percent of FBS and FCS teams as clients. Essentially, it indexes everybody’s schedule as far as the eye can see, and can sort by who’s looking for what. If a Power Five team wants to schedule a home-and-home with another Power Five team, for example, it can search to find who else wants to do the same.

Brown spent nearly 28 years at ESPN and 12 as its vice president of college football programming. Part of his job was to build the schedule, which meant hours working with conference and school administrators to fit together the puzzle pieces of every Saturday during the fall. The connections he built made pitching the new venture easy — he had already established himself as the go-between for anyone looking to schedule a game.

“Before Gridiron, you called Dave Brown,” Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said. “Now you call Dave Brown and get on his site.”

Most games on the ledger are already baked in — every FBS conference plays at least eight conference games, with the Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12 coming in at nine. Those are usually based on consistent rotations and scheduled by the league office on a given cycle. In other words — the schools themselves don’t get (or need) a ton of say in who their conference opponents are for a given year. It’s more a question of making sure everyone has optimal bye weeks and putting certain games in prime position for TV.

“We like certain matchups and we go,” said Scott Draper, an associate football commissioner for the American Athletic Conference. “Houston and Cincinnati play this year. So we want to make sure that game has an opportunity to be selected for a good television window. We know what ESPN tells us and we try to fit it into those couple weeks. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.”

Things get more scattershot in the non-conference schedule — a free-for-all with a clock ticking on everyone. Schools are responsible for their own scheduling there. It usually starts with a phone call, which can come as much as 15 years in advance.

That’s the most fascinating effect of the scramble. Texas has home-and-home matchups scheduled with Georgia in 2028 and ’29, Florida in 2030 and ’31 and Arizona State in 2032 and ’33. UCLA hosts Wisconsin in 2029 with a return leg in 2030. Oklahoma and Clemson recently announced a home and home for 2035 and ’36 — so far out that a senior in the second of those games will enter kindergarten this fall. When Alabama and Wisconsin announced a home-and-home last week for 2024 and ’25, it felt not excessive but pragmatic.

There’s no one reason for this level of planning — the precedent to schedule more than a decade ahead of time doesn’t exist in other sports. But it’s the system in place, and athletic directors feel the pressure to adhere, even if they’ll almost certainly be retired by the time those games happen.

“I think what happens is, everybody is ready to walk down the aisle and they don’t want to get down the aisle and not have a bride to kiss,” Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said. “And so that’s the challenge that you have is, sometimes if you don’t schedule far enough out, you literally can not have an opponent to play.”

Most schools have the same overriding philosophy. The first goal is to get to a number of home games — six or seven depending on the school and its conference. After that, they’ll look for opponents based on a combination of geography, fan interest and level of competition. Some aim to play a certain number of Power Five or Group of Five teams every year. Others like to find a neutral-site game.

Almost everything, though, is dictated by getting the right number of home games.

“Everybody wants seven,” Purdue AD Mike Bobinski said. “So you have a math equation here. If everybody wants seven, you’ve gotta reach outside the community of Power Five FBS schools to get that, because you’ve gotta have seven [home] games.”

That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to hard bargaining. Instead, schools work with each other to find the best answer. When the wheel stops spinning, questions like the year and location of a given leg of a home-and-home are usually determined by who needed a home game that year. Clemson will only play a neutral-site game in an even year, athletic director Dan Radakovich said, because that’s when it has South Carolina at home. Ditto for road legs of a home-and-home.

For most schools who play the same non-conference rival every year (or in some cases, like Florida and Georgia, a conference rival at a neutral site), the same logic holds true. There are niche issues as well. Independents (non-Notre Dame division) need to stay ahead of everyone else when it comes to home games. Teams that run unconventional offenses, like triple-options, have a harder time getting calls back.

Since the advent of the College Football Playoff, which has noted strength of schedule as a parameter, some programs have changed the level of opposition they look for. Others — including the two programs that have won four of the five titles under the new system — have kept doing the same thing, not noticing a difference.

“The CFP has not been overly opinionated on how many [Power] Five games you have,” Byrne said. “Some conferences play eight games, some play nine. And so the model that we’ve had at Alabama, obviously, we’ve been fortunate to have success with that.”

Radakovich agreed, saying he’s stuck to the same philosophy he had at Georgia Tech, where he held the same job from 2006-12.

It’s worth noting that neither Alabama nor Clemson plays easy schedules. By one advanced metric, Bill Connelly’s S&P+, each of them has been outside top-20 in strength of schedule just once in the playoff era. Playoff games are factored into the rating, but both programs have regularly scheduled strong opponents in the future as well, despite those contests being complemented by yearly guarantee games. Radakovich says he and coach Dabo Swinney aim to have 10 Power Five games every year; Byrne talks up the Crimson Tide’s home-and-homes against Texas, Notre Dame and Oklahoma, saying, “those types of games are good for our program, they’re good for the game of college football, and they’re good for our fans.”

Some athletic directors try to avoid excess, not wanting to set a schedule so far out that their eventual successors won’t get any kind of say. But getting those type of games usually means playing by the house rules, picking up the phone and going by the most pragmatic approach possible.

“If you really want to play somebody, just with what both teams have going on,” Brown said, “it can take awhile to get them on the schedule.”

Which is to say, your calendar better be flipped as far forward as it goes.