From the history of,” One boy’s problem is another man’s opportunity”, comes the story of Kevin Pauga, who has capitalized apparently as much as any one person from college activities ‘ planning headaches.
Pauga, Michigan State’s affiliate athletic director, is the brains behind Faktor, a sports scheduling software borne of Pauga’s lifelong interest in solving operational mysteries.
Now complicated, arranging has become even more of an oddity in recent years, between the interruptions of COVID- 19, the geographical expansion of conferences through reconfiguration, the increasing interests of television and streaming networks, and the empowerment of college athletes.
Faktor uses an algorithm to assemble these competing objectives to assemble different league planning options.

Pauga began the project ten years ago to provide information on MS U’s planning requirements for non-conference sports. In light of the difficulties Rutgers and Maryland faced when they joined the meeting the year before, he offered to assist the Big Ten for completely with its women’s tennis stone in 2015. As word spread about the availability of various leagues, he began working on paid planning tasks for the Big Ten within a few years.
Catapulted by the pandemic, Faktor then contracts with about two- quarters of Division I meetings, according to Pauga, in addition to some D- II and D- III conferences. Under the umbrella of a related company, Optimal Schedules, Pauga has also ventured into the pro ranks, with clients that include the NFL.
Collectively, Pauga says, his scheduling work generates close to$ 1 million in annual revenue, though it is unclear exactly how much of this he pockets. Pauga received a$ 100, 000 payment last year from Optimal Schedules, according to his athletic department financial disclosures. ( Incorporated in state filings, Vinaya Sharma, an Illinois-based actuary, is the president of Optimal Schedules. )
In any case, Pauga’s Optimal Schedules remittance was nearly as much as his Michigan State compensation ($ 113, 913 annually ), for a full- time job that runs the gamut of athletic department logistics concerns, from team air charters to season ticket- holder preferred parking allocations.
” I would n’t say he invented ( the position ), but if you look at the different kinds of things he does, it is something that is unique to him”, said MSU Spartans communications director Matthew Larson, who has known the 41- year- old Pauga since the latter was an MSU undergrad. I do n’t think there would be anyone coming in and filling that spot if he would leave.
Pauga does n’t appear to be interested in leaving the campus to work full-time schedule consulting. And he has n’t so far been made to choose.
The cloud computing behind Faktor is unique in that it never stops, even when Pauga is asleep or otherwise uninterested. Like, for example, this week, when Pauga is in Minneapolis, accompanying Michigan State’s men’s basketball team at the Big Ten tournament. Thursday at noon ET, MSU plays its first-round game against Minnesota.

Faktor will be cranking out schedule options for his various conference clients at a rate of about 24 per week while Pauga is rooting for the Spartans from his seat in the Target Center. That is what the business world refers to as synergy.
According to Pauga,” I am very conscious of needing to be able to balance the two in the current iteration of my Michigan State responsibilities as well as the success that has grown over the past few years.” It is something I keep in mind and purposefully place high priority on my integrity.
What about potential conflicts of interest if a Michigan State employee advises the conference on which teams should play which other teams and when? Numerous league sources claim there have been a few sporadic, subdued complaints in the past, but none have led to a formal complaint to the Big Ten.
” The conference has the final say”, Pauga said. ” I am providing multiple options, but I am not the decision maker—whether it is the Big Ten or any other conference. In addition, it is incumbent upon me to be transparent and work at a level that they do n’t question. … Frankly, if there were schedules that did n’t meet the smell test, it would n’t have gotten this far. I would n’t have earned the level of trust I have from people”.
Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny is one to sing Pauga’s praises.
In the end, Kenny described him as a “really brilliant individual who does good work and is easy to work with.” Of all the Big Ten’s third- party relationships, Kenny says Faktor is perhaps its most encompassing, as it is the league’s only contractor directly involved in each men’s and women’s sport.
” Scheduling is a math problem”, Kenny said. He is able to explain these complicated issues in a way that is simple to understand and understand.
Pauga said he typically charges a low six figure annual flat fee for major conferences, but he would not specify the specific financial terms of his Big Ten deal.
Pauga worked as the video coordinator for the basketball team for four years after graduating from MSU in 2004. Pauga made his way back to his native state of Illinois in 2008, working as a special assistant for then-commissioner Jim Delaney on data projects. Kenny, who was a conference intern at that time, recalled bonding with Pauga over their shared interest in sport- nerd hypotheticals, like whether the 1979 Michigan State Spartans would beat the 1992 Duke Blue Devils.
The Big Ten began looking for outside assistance in the aughts with Sports Scheduling Group, one of the first organizations to work in the intercollegiate space. SSG and its main competitor, Denver- based Bortz Media &amp, Sports Group, have both gotten out of the niche industry in recent years, with Bortz recently handing its college business off to Fastbreak. a scheduling technology that works with the SEC and the Big East.
Pauga left Michigan State to become the men’s basketball operations director less than a year after leaving the league.
The MSU staffer had another sports-related claim to fame before his scheduling woes, the Kevin Pauga Index, a college basketball advanced metric system that he began toying with between his sophomore and junior years.
Pauga said,” I would have given it a much cooler name if I knew anyone was going to care about it.”
Unlike two other well- known, eponymous metric systems, KenPom and Sagarin, which are meant to be predictive, the KPI looks retrospectively at a team’s performance by attempting to determine what constituted their good wins and bad losses. By the 2010s, Pauga had a cult-like following and a national reputation as an authority on NCAA analytics.
The NCAA began including the KPI among five other metrics it gave to the committee tasked with deciding bids and seeding for the men’s basketball tournament prior to the 2017-18 season.
The KPI system attempts to determine the value of a team’s wins and losses based on a wide range of inputs, but Pauga’s scheduling algorithm determines the best and worst times for two conference members to square off based on a wide range of inputs. This includes issues like faculty conflicts, television preferences, and vacation breaks. He ranks his schedules in categories of “feasible”, playable” and optimal”.
Pauga showed Sportico a mocked version of the typical scheduling matrix he would use for a conference sport season over Zoom. It is constructed as a logarithmic scale with various penalty points for various outcomes. For example, there’s a 99- point penalty if a schedule makes any team play three consecutive weekends on the road.
In order to achieve the “feasible” threshold, a draft schedule would have to address 37 non- negotiable parameters. After that, it’s up to you to figure out how to best resolve any number of “pain points,” most of which include travel time and missed classes.
For instance, the Big Ten tries to prevent basketball teams from playing more than five conference games in just 16 days.
Minimizing travel expenses can also play a role, depending on the league and the sport.
Pauga frequently engages in discussions with conference offices and scheduling committees, and he believes that a lot of his efforts are aimed at” trying to program minds” of coaches and administrators to provide him with feedback that can improve the algorithm.
Pauga is not the first athletic director from the Big Ten to have a side job. Michael Cross, the current commissioner of the Southern Conference, previously served as Penn State’s assistant AD for new business. While in that position, Cross and his wife operated a survey tool and analytics platform, Athlete Viewpoint, which did business with a number of college athletic departments, including several within the conference.
Kenny believes that Pauga’s active roles in the college athletic department are what make Faktor so useful rather than conflict.
What do coaches, administrators, and ticket people prefer, according to the statement,” There are things that go into schedules that are contractual and rigid, but then there are all these nebulous parameters.” Kenny said. At Michigan State, he is helping those people to comprehend how their worlds operate.
As much as the work comes down to mathematics, there’s been a crucial language component to it as well.
According to Pauga,” I like to think that maybe one skill set I have is that I can speak” coach,” based on my background with the team and school side, and I can also speak math,” And those two areas of expertise do n’t typically overlap. People have found it valuable to translate between the two [domains ] as the situation has evolved.
Though Pauga had been steadily gaining more assignments pre- pandemic, COVID sent Faktor into overdrive. When word of the cancellation of postseason play arrived that Pauga was at the Big Ten tournament that year in Indianapolis while doing advance work for the men’s basketball team.
” I do n’t think it was obvious at the moment what the scale and scope of the scheduling problem would be, forthcoming”, Pauga said,” but it became apparent pretty quickly afterwards”.
With conferences scrambling to schedule—and reschedule and re- reschedule—their 2020- 21 football slates, Pauga’s ensuing days were consumed with back- to- back Zoom calls with different league offices. He had started biking while the pandemic was occurring, and he occasionally took calls while on the bike when he was n’t required to show his face.
Prior to the Big Ten’s contentious decision in August 2020 to permanently postpone its fall sports season, Pauga had created a football scheduling system known as Jenga 41, which included the flexibility to play or have been removed for 41 different games. The Wonkavator is a new schedule that was created to accommodate delays and honor Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s magical, multidirectional lift.
After the league’s presidents voted to return to the field of play, the Big Ten ultimately relied on Faktor to create its truncated, conference-only football schedule for its members. Additionally, Kenny points to Pauga for allowing the conference to play 97.2 % of its scheduled athletic competitions in the 2020-2020 season.
After its westerly additions of UCLA, USC, Washington, and Oregon, the Big Ten has relied even more on Pauga to sort through its expansion to 16 teams by the following academic year. The Big Ten will introduce a” Flex Protect Plus Model” for the 2024 football season that eliminates divisional structures and guarantees that members will play at home and away from every conference opponent at least twice over the course of a four-year period.
For Pauga, the pressing question before him is how to scale the business, and what his schedule can accommodate.
” We will need to grow eventually–and probably sooner rather than later”, Pauga said. I’m not sure when I first created a schedule as a favor did I ever think it would grow to this height. I’m happy that it has, but I’ll take note of it if and when the chance arises.”
It’s another puzzle to solve, to be sure, but one that might not lend itself to an algorithm.
( The story has been updated in the fifth- to- last paragraph to correct what Kerry Kenny said about Kevin Pauga’s help with the Big Ten’s 2020- 21 scheduling. The spelling of Matthew Larson’s name in the ninth paragraph has also been corrected. )