NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

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Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

On Sunday the Seahawks and Rams will square off in a game to determine not only the lead in the NFC West, but at minimum, no worse than a tie for the best record in the NFC. Multiple figures have been declaring it not only the game of the week but potentially the game of the year… and it’s trapped on the late singleheader. Its distribution outside the West Coast is a bit broader than simply the home markets of teams playing on CBS in the early window – also covering most of the secondary markets of those teams, or at least the ones in the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Buffalo axis – but probably the majority of unaligned markets will get Bears-Vikings in the early window.

Suffice to say, the Seahawks were not expected to be this good. Back in May, their win totals at sportsbooks was around 8.5 or even 7.5, so expectations were for them to finish around or even below .500, despite narrowly missing out on the playoffs and adding Sam Darnold coming off a near-MVP-level campaign. That was good enough for their games to qualify as Tier 6, but when I put together a graphic for the week’s games after the schedule came out, this game didn’t even crack the top four games not slated for featured windows, with Niners-Cardinals getting the nod for recognition on the graphic – in large part because Seahawks-Rams wasn’t going to be available for flexing (more on that later, and more info on my thoughts on the schedule release in general in the list-of-primetime-appearances count link below). But the question seemed to be moot, because the two best games of the week seemed to be in flexible featured windows – Tier 2 Chiefs-Broncos and Tier 1 Lions-Eagles – so there didn’t seem to be a need for flexing anyway.

I did warn that there was a decently high rate of divisional games that week that had rematches in primetime and couldn’t be flexed in, with Chiefs-Broncos, Bears-Vikings, and Bengals-Steelers specifically being noted as such in the graphic. But even at the time, Seahawks-Rams stung the most, because a high-profile game on the singleheader network is bad enough without it being in the late window. The NFL seems to prioritize high-profile games not being stuck on the late singleheader, once even “overriding” an existing protection on such a game to move it to primetime. Late singleheader games are limited in distribution to protect the main late doubleheader game, never crossing the 50% mark and rarely if ever even being the singleheader network’s highest-distributed game, though a late singleheader game getting the network’s A team does happen. The only real way to prevent a high-profile divisional matchup that can’t be flexed from being trapped on the late singleheader is for every West Coast game where the other half falls in primetime to fall in a doubleheader week for its respective network, and not only is that likely to be impractical, the networks and league probably don’t even want it if it dilutes the distribution for the main late game.

Of course, this raises the question of why this game was selected for primetime to begin with if the networks don’t believe in it, and whether we’re really missing out on the game of the year if these two teams will play again later in primetime – especially since I think the Rams are the better team (Seattle spent the last two weeks beating up on mediocre-at-best teams, whoop-de-do) so the rematch in Seattle should be more competitive than this game. The answer is that the rematch between these two teams is slated for Thursday Night Football, and TNF is still the primetime package with a greater diversity of teams featured (though not necessarily as much as MNF in the “doubleheader” era) at the expense of the quality of the game. It also means the rematch isn’t going to have that big an audience given the restriction of needing Prime Video to watch the game outside of the home markets of the teams playing.

Of course, the league, on paper, thinks enough of TNF and MNF to give them flex scheduling in the new contract, but as I mentioned a few weeks back I’m not entirely sure what that actually means for them, given the difficulties in flexing games to those nights. Week 11 was a big reason for that: I raised the question of the “iffy quality” of the games in those windows back in May and those worries played out to an even greater extent than was evident back then, with me spending several weeks commenting that Week 11 barely even felt like a flex scheduling week with the Thursday night game involving the woeful Jets and Monday night involving the forgettable Raiders. If you asked people what featured-window game they’d bump out for Seahawks-Rams, they might be forced to realize that Chiefs-Broncos and Lions-Eagles are still important marquee games in their own right. What makes the Seahawks-Rams situation so offensive is the offensive quality of the games on Thursday and Monday. The league may or may not see flex scheduling as meaning much to those windows, and they may or may not see them as worthy of putting decent games on for more than a handful of weeks a season, but maybe they should. Maybe the approach that treats those windows as a dumping ground should, at minimum, be throttled back around the middle of the season, a few weeks before the flex scheduling windows open for them. There are limits to how good their schedule can be top-to-bottom, but this is the part of the schedule where having bad games there hurts the most.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Can Streaming TV Providers Make Inroads on YouTube TV with Some Surprisingly Simple Steps?

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After thinking about it for the better part of a decade, my dad finally bit the bullet and dropped Spectrum cable this summer. What pushed him over the edge was being sold on T-Mobile Home Internet to supplement his T-Mobile cell plan, even though his T-Mobile cell signal isn’t particularly reliable in our apartment. (It works well enough that we don’t have any real problems with the Home Internet service dropping out even though we have the router on a ledge a decent distance away from any windows or doors.) Frontier fiber was also an option and one we considered last year, and probably would bring better, more reliable speeds, but I think he didn’t want the rigamarole of installing all the stuff that would entail compared to plugging in one router. But while Frontier offers a bundle with YouTube TV, T-Mobile has no such thing, and instead offers a plan that comes with subscriptions to the with-ads plans of Hulu and Paramount+; I don’t know if that can defray the cost of a more expensive plan, but if it does then it’s Hulu+Live TV, normally comparably priced to YouTube TV, that benefits from a T-Mobile Home Internet plan. Nonetheless, my dad signed up for YouTube TV and I didn’t object, and we didn’t have any reason to ditch it once the free trial ran out.

This despite the fact that we found YouTube TV’s interface overrated. By reputation, YouTube TV has the best interface and experience of any streaming TV provider, but coming to it from cable was not a smooth transition. This is especially the case early on when the algorithm hasn’t figured out which shows and channels you actually like and half the suggestions that show up are things you don’t care about. Leave that aside, and some of the quirks can’t be helped given the limitations of most streaming device remotes; on the Roku remote, a streaming service has a directional pad, an OK button, and a Back⬅️ button to work with, and if you’re lucky can find creative things to do with the DVR controls. So it’s unsurprising that there isn’t a one-button way to “channel surf” like there was on cable, or a number pad to pull up a specific channel instantly; that does mean that, if the channel you’re looking for is deep enough in the guide and the program you’re looking for doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions at the top of the Home or Live screens, you’re in for a lot of scrolling, but you can reorder the channel lineup to put the channels you actually watch at the top and mitigate that.

Nonetheless, there isn’t an easy way to pull up a description of the program you’re currently watching, and it’s even harder to pull up full descriptions of shows if the space on the Live (Guide) view isn’t sufficient; even for future shows hitting OK will generally pull up info on the show as a whole, not the specific episode or event in that time slot. If you want to scroll the guide more than a day into the future, there’s no way to advance the guide a day at a time like there is on a cable remote; the Rewind⏪ and Fast Forward⏩ buttons on the Roku remote do nothing on the guide, which seems like a missed opportunity. And while it at least used to be possible to put up the full-screen view and continue the program you were watching in the background, at some point in the last few months that stopped being the case, with the current program shutting off if you hit the Back button with no way I can tell to avoid it, which also means returning to the current program isn’t as simple as pressing Up until you’re above the menu bar.

To some degree, this is all stuff that just took some getting used to. For the most part, me and Dad have reached the point of handling the YouTube TV interface fairly smoothly. But all the talk of YouTube TV having the gold standard interface of streaming TV providers seems overblown; there are definitely some places where I could make improvements. And most other streaming TV providers have reached parity on the more concrete features where YouTube has historically stood out; Sling is the only major streaming TV provider that doesn’t offer unlimited DVR for no extra charge, for example. Multiview is now the feature where YouTube TV stands out the most, but it’s not such an overwhelming advantage that people are likely to look past more concrete issues for it. At the least, it doesn’t seem like YouTube TV’s interface and general experience is such an overwhelming advantage that no one can take a bite out of it, that the lack of, say, MLB Network shouldn’t drive people who would otherwise watch it away because the interface is so amazing.

And yet, it is. So much so that it may be leading Disney, for the first time ever, to be losing a carriage dispute. And it might say a lot more about other streaming TV providers than YouTube TV.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

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On Wednesday’s First Take, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo ranted about the Cowboys’ surfeit of nationally televised games. Of the eight games the Cowboys have after the bye, six are slated for featured windows – and one of the other two is in Week 18, where nothing can be slated for featured windows ahead of time. Russo acknowledged “I know they’re gonna get ratings” but begged Joe Buck not to claim that the Cowboys “have a chance to make the playoffs” when he calls the Cowboys against the Raiders in two weeks, declaring “They! Are! Out! Of! It!”

A few hours later, ESPN underscored why the Cowboys are scheduled for so many nationally televised windows and are unlikely to be flexed out of all of them. This past Monday’s Cardinals-Cowboys game drew 16.2 million viewers, the second-highest total ESPN has drawn in Week 9 since 2011. Two sub-.500 teams drew an audience a million viewers over Monday Night Football‘s season average despite the Disney networks being blacked out on YouTube TV. To put that in perspective, Saturday’s big Oklahoma-Tennessee game had the lowest viewership of any program to be the most-watched opposite a World Series Game 7 in over 20 years, by over two million, despite only one such program in the intervening time being a live event of any kind and none of them being live sports. I have to imagine it would have done significantly better without the YouTube TV blackout, yet Cardinals-Cowboys managed to hold up to the tune of nearly four times the audience. (That said, it was the worst viewership mark of the season for a game that wasn’t part of a “doubleheader”, trailing two games that were part of “doubleheaders” and last week’s Washington-Chiefs game that went up against the World Series itself.)

This is why “Cowboys uber alles” exists: no matter how bad the Cowboys get, they can draw good enough ratings that networks would line up to get a package of just their games, and even if this year’s Cowboys might seem to “stink”, their offense is good enough that even games that might look like mismatches on paper have the potential to be entertaining. That doesn’t mean the Cowboys are completely immune to flexing – witness Cowboys-Browns a few years ago or, if you count late afternoon games, Cowboys-Eagles last year – but it seems like either both teams have to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, or the Cowboys could be eliminated but wouldn’t be if the game was played at an earlier time. None of that is likely to apply this year; the Cowboys’ Week 17 game is being played on Christmas and can’t be flexed, while their Week 16 game is their one remaining game before Week 18 that’s not scheduled for a featured window, and the prospect of it being flexed into primetime will affect what game does get flexed.

That leaves only two remaining Cowboys games in flexible featured windows, not counting Eagles-Cowboys on Fox Week 12, both with enough time left in the season that Cowboys fans could still have an outside chance of making the playoffs: Cowboys-Lions on the Thursday after Thanksgiving, and Vikings-Cowboys on Sunday night Week 15. I think Bears-Packers could potentially be swapped for Cowboys-Lions and keep the “full week’s rest for both teams” component of the week-after-Thanksgiving game, but even if that was under consideration Fox would probably protect it and swap it in for Bengals-Bills in its late doubleheader window instead. As for Vikings-Cowboys, the NFL wishes it was the worst of its problems that week because if it were, and if they were willing to flex it, they could simply swap in Colts-Seahawks; instead, as we’ve detailed in past weeks, they’re stuck looking at the even worse Dolphins in the Monday night window without a viable alternative to pivot to. Still, if the Cowboys are far enough out of it by then, that might be a situation worth paying attention to.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

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Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game, except in this opening section.

On Thursday Lamar Jackson made his triumphant return under center for the Ravens as they walloped the spiraling Dolphins 28-6, with the team picking up twice as many wins over the last five days as they had the entire season up to that point. It’s given them a good enough record that their games will qualify for being flex candidates on next week’s post, but it’s also weirdly unsurprising. Even when the Ravens were sitting at 1-5 and staring at what would ordinarily be daunting odds of making the playoffs, it was hard to write them off entirely. The Ravens faced a daunting first quarter of the season with three of their first four games coming against not only playoff teams but legitimate Super Bowl contenders, and right when their schedule looked like it might start getting easier, Jackson went down and the Ravens found themselves getting blown out by the mediocre Texans. The Bills’ struggles (getting outplayed by the Patriots at home and losing to the mediocre Falcons) have made it look like even the full-strength Ravens aren’t as good as we’re used to, but there was always reason to think that, when healthy, the Ravens were substantially better than 1-5 made them look.

And now that they’ve cleared that early season gauntlet, the path might be clear for them to make the playoffs. The Browns are still the Browns and the Bengals are going through yet another season from hell without Joe Burrow, leaving the Steelers as the only other respectable team in the division, and they haven’t been performing as well as you’d like either. The Ravens entered the week only two games back of the division lead with both Steelers games still to play, and their respective schedules go in very different directions. The Steelers have only one game against a team with a losing record that isn’t in their division the rest of the season, while the Ravens face only two teams with winning records that aren’t the Steelers: the Patriots Week 16 and the Packers Week 17.

Unfortunately, that means they won’t be much help for flex scheduling windows that otherwise find themselves lacking in options – especially since the second Steelers game is Week 18, which also means the first game in Week 14 probably can’t be flexed away from CBS in a week they have the singleheader (and where they already have another flex-immune potentially-division-deciding game in Colts-Jaguars). Ravens-Patriots falls in the one week that doesn’t need the help to provide flexing options, although if it comes down to that game or Jaguars-Broncos I think Ravens-Patriots would get the nod on name value all else being equal (although Jaguars-Broncos being a late singleheader game could counteract that).

But the broadcaster hoping the hardest to see a Ravens winning streak would be, of all things, Peacock. When the schedule was announced it looked like the league had made a big splash with its Saturday Week 17 games with multiple games pitting teams expected to have winning records coinciding with Peacock picking up the rights to one of the games, with the centerpiece being Ravens-Packers, a Tier 2 game that any of the networks would be proud to have in one of their regular marquee windows. Those games have almost all disappointed, and the only Saturday-eligible game pitting two teams at or above .500 at the moment is Seahawks-Panthers, a game that wasn’t expected to be particularly good. If the Ravens make a push for the playoffs, Peacock’s original vision of getting a game between marquee teams with playoff implications in primetime is back on the table, with Seahawks-Panthers or Texans-Chargers providing a more than suitable undercard game for NFL Network.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Introducing Cantonmetrics 2.0

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Over the course of the past week, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the figures to advance to the next stage of consideration in all four of the categories from which people can potentially be inducted into Canton, which makes it as good a time as any to roll out the next evolution of the Cantonmetrics feature.

The main change is that the charts that have made up the Cantonmetrics posts in the past can now be found on a searchable Google spreadsheet, which can be found HERE.

In addition to dynamically updating the lists of retired players, coaches, and contributors after each cutdown announcement, as well as the list of active players after each season is complete, the spreadsheet also contains tabs for the All-Snub Team and my attempt to track the contenders for the All-Decade Team of the 2020s. In addition to the metrics already being tracked and the Hall of Fame Monitor, all tabs now contain the Legends Score, an attempt to measure players based on postseason honors only based on a measure devised by the Future Football Legends website, but which I’ve made some adjustments to. I expect to make more changes, adjustments, and improvements next offseason as well.

This page contains more information about how to read the spreadsheet as well as a general introduction to the concept of Cantonmetrics, and I’m adding a link to the top bar as well. I may decide to embed the spreadsheet directly onto a static page, but I’m not sure exactly what to include on it to justify the separate existence of the introduction page, if in fact I need to justify not simply placing it on there to begin with.

After the jump, some thoughts about this particular round of cuts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

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What does flexible scheduling mean for Monday and Thursday Night Football, particularly when it comes to how the league sees them?

Historically, ESPN’s package was considered the secondary primetime package getting games of somewhat questionable quality, while Thursday nights were a tertiary package hobbled by the need to show every team exactly once to balance out everyone’s short weeks. The NFL has attempted to improve the quality of the games both packages have gotten over the last decade; during the “broadcast-network-and-NFLN-simulcast” era for TNF (during a time when the league’s relationship with ESPN was… not great) it regularly rated ahead of MNF in simulcast weeks and the league treated it accordingly, giving it games as good as the restrictions on the package allowed for, and since Jimmy Pitaro has taken the helm at ESPN and started simulcasting MNF games on ABC, and especially since the new TV deal that gives ABC and ESPN Super Bowls, the league has started giving them better games as well, including last year’s Super Bowl rematch between the Niners and Chiefs. This year ESPN got two Tier 1 games, Lions-Ravens and Washington-Chiefs, the latter of which was also identified as one of the most coveted games for TV partners by the posters on the 506sports Discord. But NBC, CBS, and Fox each got at least three Tier 1 games and at least three coveted games, and Amazon didn’t get any game in either category.

Part of what holds Monday and Thursday nights back is how many games of each team they’re able to air. Since the start of the new TV deals, no team has been scheduled for more than two games on either package at the start of the year, and we know no team can play more than two in the case of Thursday nights. NBC, by contrast, regularly has teams scheduled for as many as three games at the start of the year, and even before the expansion of the season could have teams flexed in for a fourth. ESPN is further constricted by their “doubleheaders” giving them more games than the other primetime package and requiring them to show games involving more teams, making them the package of last resort for teams with only one primetime appearance, not TNF like it used to be. This all has the effect of limiting how many good games each package can air and increasing the chance that each package will show games involving teams of questionable quality, even if the days of the Jags and Titans squaring off in the Tank Bowl on TNF are in the past. And while both packages are getting better games, and more good games, than they used to, they’re still mixed in with a number of games that wouldn’t be caught dead on SNF or as the lead late doubleheader game.

So what are the league’s expectations for those packages in light of the expansion of flex scheduling to them? Flexible scheduling brings with it the expectation that there’s a level of quality the league doesn’t want the packages to fall below, but that’s not necessarily the level that the league schedules them for. Both packages have had games scheduled for flexible windows that seemed to be of questionable quality when the schedule came out, though ESPN more so than Amazon; both last year and this year, the Monday after Thanksgiving got its week tagged as a “yellow light” week as a week where the league might pull the flex if every team involved played exactly as expected, and last year each package also contributed to identifying a “red light” week where the league would want to pull a flex but couldn’t because of the additional protections CBS and Fox got in the new TV deals. So far, no SNF game has been expected to be the worst flexible game in a week I tagged as “yellow light” or “red light”. So is the league okay with continuing to schedule questionable games for Monday and Thursday nights despite the expansion of flex scheduling to them? But what to make of those “yellow light” weeks where, based on the expectations surrounding the teams when the schedule comes out, the league would already be expected to flex out of their own game?

Worth noting that last year’s “yellow light” game ended up not being flexed out (much to my surprise), and this year’s game seems unlikely to be flexed out either. In both cases, the reason may have to do with how changing the date a game is played affects the amount of rest teams get, which may be the main factor preventing flexible scheduling from raising the level of Monday and Thursday nights too much, besides the restrictions on the number of times teams can play on each night. Teams obviously can’t play Thursday night games immediately following Monday night games (Sunday-to-Thursday jumps are bad enough), and teams playing on Monday or Thursday nights in consecutive weeks are probably something the league wants to avoid in general because of the rest mismatches they create. Even Monday night games after Thursday games might be a bridge too far for the league, exacerbating the rest mismatch that already exists the week after a Thursday game.

All of this may be coming to a head when it comes to the Miami Dolphins, starting the season 1-6 and in an absolute tailspin with people wondering why head coach Mike McDaniel hasn’t been fired yet. The Dolphins are scheduled for a Week 15 Monday night clash with Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, in a week where I was already worried about the number of marquee games unable to be flexed due to being divisional matchups with rematches on the wrong network. But if the game were the Sunday nighter, as will be the case for the Dolphins the following week, it could be flexed out no problem, with the Colts successfully “playing their way into primetime”. On Monday night, the game not only has to deal with not shortening anyone’s rest for the following week’s Thursday game, but the two games Fox has scheduled for the following Saturday. That means ESPN’s options for replacing it are very limited, and it’s not clear that the options they do have are any better.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

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Note: This post (mostly) does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game.

It’s time for another year of the Flex Schedule Watch, and as I alluded to in May I’m rolling out new HTML tables for the weekly display of games, even though two of the reasons I cited back then didn’t pan out. WordPress technically has a dedicated block for tables, but it also hijacks a lot of the HTML behind them, replaces some functions with its own custom code, and rejects some perfectly valid HTML if it doesn’t do things the way it wants to, which wouldn’t be quite so bad if the formatting options below the level of the entire table weren’t so limited. On its own, that would be enough to lead me to use a “custom HTML” block for the tables. The resulting table is narrow enough that I decided I wanted to have the body text wrap around it, and to avoid running into the same problem that frustrated me with the old graphics I ended up resorting to exploiting code WordPress normally only uses to support the classic editor. That could have allowed me to keep the table without resorting to the classic editor for the rest of the post, but the table is also wide enough that the text can’t squeeze in between the tables, and WordPress hijacks the HTML that would normally force the body text below any tables on the same side and I don’t know if it even has its own way of doing that, so classic editor it is.

Still, the point about screen readers remains valid, and this format allows me to include more and more descriptive notes, which is important when considering how complex and overlapping all the different factors I wanted to cover there were becoming – see the places where I noted Thursday or Monday night games in preceding or following weeks on the May post. (The main factor that convinced me to stick with this format and not go back to the previous format was just how difficult it was going to be to keep track of everything in Weeks 15 and 16 in particular. If I do ditch this format, I may still change how the weekly graphics look compared to last year.) Beyond that, I want to see how hard or easy, or fun, this will be to maintain compared to the previous system. Getting the graphics from the last couple of years to look the way I want in Excel was harder than it looked, because of a confluence of factors involving how Excel supports pictures and other visual elements that aren’t part of the cells themselves, as well as how varying border widths affects the whole spreadsheet. (Last year’s Week 15 graphics, which started with three rows of flexible windows instead of two, had to be worked on on an entirely separate set of rows from the rest of the graphics.)

This does mean I’ll have to update the team records and equivalent of the Buzzmeter manually, though, which could result in this approach taking longer than the previous system, but I could still end up deciding it’s worth it if I enjoy it more than wrestling with Excel, especially since I did something similar before with the Playoff Pictures – although it might not be a good sign that I’m probably still going to use static images for those. (Also, I’ve seriously been considering not ordering the flex candidates by quality and instead ordering them according to the order they’re in on the NFL web site, freeing me from having to copy-and-paste rows manually.) Ultimately, I consider this an experiment in whether this approach will work going forward, though I’m already not optimistic. Still, I went to all the trouble to put together new team-logo graphics and even graphics for each individual featured window, so I might as well get some use out of them.

Speaking of the Buzzmeter, because of the limitations of HTML – as, to my knowledge, I can’t crop an image with HTML alone – what I’ve done is color the background of the notes section from red to yellow to green based on the record of the worse team in each game. I was going to put a colored circle between the teams but it wasn’t big enough for the color to stand out. I’m still not completely happy with this, though, and I might end up deciding to add a blank column, either between the teams, on the far left side, or between the timeslot/broadcaster logo and the team logos. I welcome any input you might have as to what might work best.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Cantonmetrics: 2026 Preliminary Nominees

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Offseason Snapshot

Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction.

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Diagnosing Democracy, Part III: The Party’s Over, Now Let’s Get It Right This Time

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A year ago I read an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch celebrating that Joe Biden being forced out of the Democratic nomination represented the reassertion of the principle that “nominations belong to parties, not to candidates”. Rauch argued that “for most of U.S. history…Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life”, nurturing and directing politicians and ultimately controlling who ran for office on their ticket, from President all the way down to dog catcher, from the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”.

Contrary to popular belief, the decision-makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests…And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates…Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt – traits no one wants to go back to – they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths.

By 2016, however, in a process started when the Democrats put more weight on the primary process following the contentious 1968 nomination fight – which initially resulted in George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, leading to party insiders clawing back influence in the “invisible primary” – “the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless and corrupt intermediaries at worst”. In Rauch’s telling, the revelation in the hacked DNC e-mails of the party putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders would, in times past, have gotten a shrug: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!” While the Republican Party has effectively become a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, the Democrats continue to exert influence over the nomination, lining up behind Biden in 2020 and forcing him off the ticket in ’24, showing that “both man and party” can “put the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.”

Rauch argues that the weakening of the role of party professionals has fueled our present-day dysfunction, creating bitter divisions between factions that put furthering their ideology ahead of the national interest. Americans may “have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands”, but the demonstration that “a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture” can point the way forward. Our democracy, in Rauch’s telling, worked because party bosses had the perspective to ignore the screeching of ideologues and choose the candidate that could best appeal to the broadest cross-section of the electorate, that could actually win an election.

You know, like when they stopped Sanders from dooming the party to certain defeat and chose Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, as the best choice to win the election, as opposed to the Republicans who fell victim to the Trump insurgency that would surely doom them in November.

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Wither the Linear Cable Network?

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On Monday, three years after WarnerMedia was spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery, the company announced that it was splitting back apart. WBD will split into a “Streaming and Studios” company consisting of the various studios, mostly Warner Bros-branded but also including DC Studios, as well as HBO and the streaming service about to be re-renamed back to HBO Max, and a “Global Networks” company with all of the current WBD’s non-HBO linear networks as well as the discovery+ streaming service.

This comes on the heels of Comcast announcing its plans to split off most of its linear cable networks (except Bravo) to a new company to be called Versant, and it might seem like WBD is playing follow-the-leader, splitting off everything that’s not actively contributing to its streaming business to get its fading linear cable businesses off the books. But there are some key differences. Most of the networks Comcast is spinning off don’t really provide much value on their own; USA airs sports content but most of it was purchased by NBCUniversal, usually with NBCSN being the originally intended cable outlet, and will now effectively be sublicensed out to Versant, and NBCU’s most recent major sports rights deals with the Big Ten and NBA have left out USA entirely in favor of signing rights for the NBC broadcast network and Peacock alone. Very few Versant outlets air much in the way of truly original programming, at least outside cheap true crime documentaries; the main outlets producing real value on their own would probably be CNBC and MSNBC.

That is not the case with the WBD split. While Comcast is keeping all of NBC Universal’s sports rights, the sports rights WBD holds under the TNT and Eurosport banners will be going with the “Global Networks” division, which I’ll be referring to as “Turner Discovery” for the rest of this post while referring to “Streaming and Studios” as “Warner Bros.” CNN is still a going concern and arguably still a stronger news brand than MSNBC, plus there’s all the documentary and reality programming from the Discovery networks and kids’ and other animated programming on Cartoon Network. (In fact, there’s an open question as to whether or not Cartoon Network will really be separated from the studio that effectively produces all of its programming – and it’s an especially pressing question at Adult Swim, which effectively is Williams Street, the studio that not only produces all of its original programming but runs the network/block.) All of this would be valuable content for any streaming service; indeed, Turner Discovery will not only be coming with an existing streaming service in discovery+, but is working on a new one for CNN.

The problem is, though, it hasn’t added that much value to Max. WBD chair David Zaslav has admitted that sports has not been a major driver of Max sign-ups (unlike with Peacock), and Max’s failure to gain traction in the kids-and-family space has raised questions about the future of Cartoon Network more generally and led them to not only strip Max of most kids’ content in favor of continuing to license to outside streamers, but increasingly, to produce new kids’ series for those streamers as well. The rebrand back to HBO Max is effectively an admission that the one thing that actually has provided value to the service has been the sort of prestige TV and movies that have long been HBO’s bread and butter, and this split is effectively an announcement that WarnerMedia intends to focus the service on those things nigh-exclusively.

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