Colts owner Jim Irsay giving away $1M in schedule contest

The Colts announced a contest where people can enter for a chance at $1M by correctly predicting the Colts' upcoming 2023 schedule. If there is no winner, Irsay announced he will award four season tickets to the person with the most correct predictions.

If it sounds impossible to predict an NFL schedule, that's because it pretty much is.

In 2014, the then-St. Louis Rams ran a similar promotion but with a prize of $100,000. At the time, Slate ran the numbers and estimated that based on the likelihood of someone accurately predicting an entire schedule, the prize should have been worth $135 trillion.

In 2019, USA Today ran a report on what goes into NFL scheduling and Nate Davis wrote, "Just one team's schedule -- minus any influencing factors -- can be constructed roughly 60 trillion ways when merely considering the sequence of 16 opponents."

As that report noted, that was back when an NFL schedule had 16 games, making it even more difficult to predict now that it's increased to 17.

One million dollars is nothing to an NFL owner like Irsay, not that he's likely to part with it because of this promotion. But if someone defies the odds and correctly predicts the 18-week schedule (including the bye week), Irsay may want to move them into an executive role. 

After all, with a little over a week until the 2023 NFL Draft, the Colts owner painted a picture of a team uncertain of what it will do on draft night.