While there’s a lot of information in Blizzard’s announcement of the 2019 Overwatch League schedule, there are also a number of holes left to fill. Here’s what we know:

• The first day of the season is Thursday, February 14.
• As was the case last season, there will be four stages, each five weeks long.
• Each team will play seven games per stage, for a total of 28 on the season. From this, we can infer that each stage will feature 70 games.
• There will be stage finals after the first three stages (not the fourth), each involving the top eight teams.
• The All-Star Break will take place between Stages 2 and 3, with a “longer break” in between those two stages.
• The end-of-season playoffs will include the top six teams by standings, with the next six teams (#7-#12) involved in a “play-in tournament” in an “epic win-or-go-home bracket.”

The schedule I’ve drawn up takes all of these into consideration, while also making a few assumptions of my own, notably:

• Blizzard would probably still like to stick to having games across four days each week. The Overwatch World Cup runs on three-day weeks, and that might fit things, but five days would likely be too long and run games over until Monday, which seems a little off. If Blizzard wanted to go that route, it probably would have stuck with Wednesday as the first day of the week.
• On a four-day-per-week schedule, five weeks times four days = 20 days, and 70 games divided by 20 days = 3.5 games per day.
• Blizzard will stick with the single-elimination format for stage playoffs and the “best of three” approach for the season finals, adding seven more games to each stage. The “bracket” description of the play-in at the end of the season sounds like what the Overwatch World Cup does, and will likely follow the same format.
• There will be one week between stages, as was the case in the first season. The “longer break” between Stages 2 and 3 to accommodate the All-Star Break means an extra week before and after that weekend.
• Will Blizzard try to avoid American holidays? In 2018, there were no games played over Easter Weekend or the weekends around the 4^th of July (which was on a Wednesday), but they did play games over Memorial Day Weekend.
• If games are to be played on Sundays, there’s another “conflict” Blizzard might seek to avoid: the NFL. The Super Bowl is on February 3, two weeks before the OWL season begins, so that’s not a problem, but the first Sunday of the 2019 NFL season will likely be September 8. It’s just possible to fit a schedule inside this window, though it does produce some conflicts with the holidays mentioned in the last post.

So, here’s what my prospective schedule looks like, with holidays and holiday weekends noted in red:

In weeks one through four of each stage, four games are played per day. That’s 16 games per week, or 64 through four weeks. The first two days of the fifth week feature three games apiece, representing the end of the “regular season” for that stage. The third day (Saturday) has four quarterfinal games, whittling the stage playoff field down to four, and the fourth day (Sunday) has the two semifinals and the finals.

One question with this approach, though, is why Blizzard wouldn’t do stage playoffs after Stage 4. That could mean that the plan is to have stage finals take place a week after the stage concludes, but that would further extend the schedule into late September and possibly October, which then runs the risk of running against the NFL. Or, given the more relaxed schedule for teams, perhaps there’s no official “off week” between stages? I might believe that, except that the All-Star Break is explicitly depicted as giving teams a “longer break,” so some kind of downtime between the other stages is clearly part of the plan.

If each four days per week/20 days total stage consists entirely of “regular season” games, then a 3-4-3-4 pattern each week gets us to 70 games, but then where do the 7 playoff games go? I don’t think Blizzard would try and jam them all into one extra day, as it did with the three-game stage playoffs last season. If it’s a three-day week and five games per day, that would give us 75 potential games per stage, with the fifth week potentially running an extra day and looking like 5-5-4(playoff)-3(playoff), but that again seems like not much of a reason to skip the Stage 4 playoffs.

Another reason to skip the Stage 4 playoffs might be that there’s no off week planned between the end of the stage and the play-in tournament, which would give those teams a little more time to rest up and prepare than the typical break between weeks. However, given the lengthy breaks between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs in season one (24 days), it seems unlikely that Blizzard wouldn’t want at least some break. Maybe flip the post-Stage 4 off week (August 8-11) with the Play-in week (August 15-18)?

One final note not directly related to the scheduling, but interesting nonetheless: Given the larger number of teams in the playoffs, the “pick an opponent” rule for the #1 seed in stage playoffs seems to have fallen by the wayside. Personally, I’m OK with that, as it seemed a tad gimmicky.

Tl;dr: Today’s announcement, along with a few assumptions, lets us predict a 2019 OWL schedule that runs right up until Labor Day, though it’s got a few quirks with how it interacts with holidays and how it handles playoffs, especially stage playoffs.