Say it in plain English.
The hardest part of scheduling software has never been the schedule. It's telling the software what your league's rules actually are, through a form built by someone who has never met your league. Smart rules lets you type the rule instead, then shows you what it would do to your season before you commit to it.
01 · Describe
Type the rule, not the form
“No team plays back-to-back road games.” “Field 3 is dark after 6pm in October.” “Coach Oyelaran has two teams and can't be in two places at once.” Say it the way you'd say it to another human and Smart rules works out what you meant.
Most of the time what you described is a rule Big Sports already has, and it tells you so plainly: here's the rule for that, here's how it's set, here's what it does. When it isn't, it builds you a new one that behaves like a first-class rule: it can be hard or soft, weighted, switched off, edited, and deleted like anything else in your list.
You are never trapped in the text box. The rule catalogue is one click away, and it stays there for anyone who would rather pick from a list.
02 · Evidence
It shows its work before you accept
This is the part that matters. A rule that was generated for you is only useful once you know what it will do. So before you accept it, Big Sports runs it against your real season and shows you the result: how many of your games it flags, which teams and dates those are, and a couple of specific games with a verdict on each: this one breaks the rule, this one doesn't.
Those are your actual games, not examples the model wrote to sound convincing. If the rule you described would blow up half your October, you find that out while it costs you nothing.
If you want to see the exact logic it built, you can open it and read it in full.
One limit: the check needs a schedule to run against. If you're writing rules during setup, before you've generated anything, there are no games to check yet and the rule is simply accepted as written. Generate the season and the evidence is there from then on, including for every rule you add afterwards.
03 · The boundary
The model never touches your schedule
Language models are good at reading a sentence and bad at being accountable. So Big Sports uses one for exactly the first job and none of the second. The model reads what you typed and produces a rule. The engine, with no model anywhere in it, takes your rules and produces the schedule.
That split is why the check above can exist: there's a real schedule, built from your rules, to test the new rule against. A tool that lets a model write the games directly can only give you its own summary of what it did.
And every rule it builds is a change like any other. It lands in your history with your name and the time on it, and you can take it back out.
04 · Limits
What it doesn't do yet
Smart rules writes rules. It does not set up your league for you, import your teams, or move games around on your behalf. There is no chat window you can ask to reshuffle October.
We'd like to build those. When they ship, this page will say so.
Questions
Questions people ask
- Does the AI build my schedule?
- No. Smart rules turns a sentence into a rule. The engine, which has no language model anywhere in it, builds the schedule from your rules. That split matters: every game's slot traces back to rules you can read, so you can explain the schedule to a board.
- What if it misreads what I meant?
- You'll see it before it counts. Every rule comes back written out in plain terms, with the games in your season it would flag and the ones it wouldn't, and there's a line you can open to read its exact logic. If it's wrong, tell it what it got wrong and it rebuilds, or change the details yourself. Nothing reaches your schedule until you accept it.
- What happens if it can't build what I asked for?
- If what you described matches a rule Big Sports already has, you land on that rule instead, filled in from what you typed, and you can change any of the details before you add it. If it can't build it at all, it says why, and suggests a close version it can build. It doesn't invent a rule that half-works and let you find out in week six.
- Do I have to use it?
- No. Every rule type your plan includes is still there to pick from a list, and that isn't going away. Pick one and it lands on the same card with its usual values filled in and a blank for anything you need to choose. Some rules are faster to click than to describe.
- Is it included in my plan?
- Smart rules is a Plus feature, and every new account comes with 21 days of Plus free, so you can try it before deciding anything. Free covers the core rules (rest days, game limits, venue and holiday blackouts, fixed matchups), picked from the list. The rules that mark a bigger operation, like coach and family conflicts, home and away balance and travel limits, are Plus, whichever way you author them.
Get started
Start a season.
Twenty-two teams on four fields is an ordinary season here. Bring yours and see what it does with them.
Start with 21 days of Plus, free. No card up front.