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Last week, I said that “barring a surprise announcement in the next twelve hours or so, the league seems to have passed up chances to flex out of two Browns games this week”. Well, guess what happened.

Literally minutes after that post went up, someone went on the 506sports Discord claiming to work at SoFi Stadium and that he’d been told to be available for December 19, implying if not stating that Broncos-Chargers was going to be flexed to that date. I was deeply skeptical; more than anything else it reminded me of the time someone went into my comment section claiming to work at MetLife Stadium and that they knew for a fact that (if I recall, since I can’t find the posts in question) a Raiders-Jets game that seemed to make no sense to flex in was nonetheless going to be flexed in. When that didn’t pan out, if I recall, they claimed to have misinterpreted the evidence they were looking at, but I’ve had enough experience running into people who seem to be pathological liars on Twitter, and seeing people fall for blatant misinformation, to know that someone can easily claim to have credentials they don’t have and make up anything they want to whip people into a frenzy.

But then people with actual credentials started weighing in. An NFL reporter for CBS said it was under consideration and that the league had until Friday to make the decision – implying, once the Browns beat the Steelers that night, that it wasn’t going to happen. Then a relatively random account said that the league had pulled the flex right before the midnight ET deadline that night, then a Cincinnati-area radio host, and finally the actual announcement came in around 11 AM ET.

I’ve got a lot to say about this, so I’m saving it for after the jump, but first, the rules spiel.

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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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As someone put it on the 506sports Discord, we may have a 4-8 vs. 4-8 flex-eligible primetime game because of a cartoon sitcom.

On Monday Disney released another trailer for their “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast of the Week 14 Monday night game, seemingly doubling down on that game remaining Bengals-Cowboys. Shortly afterward, a Bengals beat writer tweeted that the game is ineligible to be flexed out due to all the work that has gone into the various art assets that would be used on the broadcast. Even considering the source I’m not sure I buy that it literally can’t be moved, but it’s pretty clear that Disney doesn’t want to back out of Bengals-Cowboys, and flexing it out would effectively cancel the alt-cast as reconfiguring it to work with another game would not be possible.

This likely all started with Disney not getting another Sunday morning European game this year, with its ESPN+ game instead forming part of a Monday night “doubleheader”. The previous “Toy Story Funday Football” alt-cast was associated with a European game that wasn’t subject to flexing, and if this had been in the works for long enough the idea may have been that this would be too. ESPN had explicitly said that the ESPN+ game would be an international game when the contracts were announced so I don’t think they would have backed away from that if Disney themselves didn’t want to (then again, I could say the same about Fox’s “as the schedule allows” Christmas games considering next year Christmas falls on a Thursday and the league could schedule two Christmas games with neither one on Fox), but nonetheless it was a change that may have left the people behind the alt-cast scrambling.

In retrospect, Disney probably should have chosen a game for the alt-cast that fell outside the flexible scheduling window and not run the risk of the game being flexed out, or at least not put themselves in the position where the league might want to flex the game out. But Bengals-Cowboys must have seemed like a pretty safe bet if the decision was made before the season or even in September. Disney surely observed the league’s practice of “Cowboys uber alles” over the last decade and a half, where Cowboys games would never be flexed out of Sunday nights even in situations where they absolutely would be for any other team, and figured that would apply here too. And hey, not only are the Cowboys always relevant in the Dak Prescott era, they’re playing the Bengals and Joe Burrow, who should always be contenders. So it may technically be flexible, but it’s not really flexible, is it?

Well, things haven’t worked out that way. The Bengals got out to what initially seemed like another slow start, something they haven’t been strangers to in the Burrow era, but have never really caught fire the way they have in years past, and after yet another blown lead against the Chargers their playoff hopes may be hanging by a thread. Against the Cowboys, that might not normally be enough to be flexed out. But the Cowboys aren’t just bad; with Prescott done for the season, they may well be actively tanking at this point, giving up on the season entirely. And Cowboys or no Cowboys, why would the league want to put on a team that isn’t even trying?

Perhaps the worst thing about it is, if the alt-cast really is preventing the league from flexing the game out, it’s not even a viable data point for where the bar is to flex out a Cowboys game. It’s a case where both teams could have poor records and be out of playoff contention, which has rarely been the case for past bad Cowboys games, but unlike with the one Cowboys game that did get flexed out, there shouldn’t be a risk that both teams will be eliminated from the playoffs entirely by the time the game kicks off, so there’s no way of knowing whether that situation would be enough for a flex in the future. We may never know if the only reason Bengals-Cowboys shows up on ESPN’s air in two and a half weeks is for the sake of an alt-cast that should get a fraction of the game’s audience.

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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.

Read more

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

Underscoring my continued struggles with finding something to put in the opening section, I had this mostly written on Tuesday, and even had an idea for what to put here, but I’m not writing the opening section until early Friday morning. Not helping matters is that the thing I was going to put here had to do with my screwing up multiple times when putting together this week’s graphics; forgetting that I intended to extend one of the weekly graphics down a row, so you’ll see me talk about the prospect of flexing a game that’s not on the graphic to TNF, and updating the wild card standings for the result of the Dolphins-Rams game but not the division standings, so those aren’t accurate. I actually re-did the Week 17 graphic because I’d forgotten that I’ve only done one row of the Sunday options that week, and the games I’ve been storing in the second row aren’t necessarily the games I would feature in a proper post including that row.

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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.

Read more

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

After I mentioned the multitude of 2-win teams last week more people from outside our little corner of the NFL galaxy have taken notice; maybe it’s because the Titans and Panthers winning means the 2-7 teams are now tied for last place, or maybe it’s because they more than outweighed the Jets winning to make the number just a little bit bigger. I already said all I needed to say about that last week (though my Browns-make-a-run-with-Winston prediction isn’t looking too hot), so all I’ll say now is that having more two-win teams and having them be in last place makes putting together the graphics all the more difficult. It’s also striking to note that the 2-6 Titans (and Dolphins) make the “waiting in the wings” section of the AFC playoff picture, yet there are still four AFC teams absent from there because they’re at 2-7.

I think this week I’ve run into the limitations of this opening section. It worked well last year when I kept getting insights into the league’s thought process nearly every week (even if those insights have increasingly proven useless), and also when I had a point to make about a specific team that spanned multiple weeks of the main flex period. But now, with Bengals-Chargers being flexed in for Colts-Jets, we’ve gotten a flex decision that has wide-ranging consequences for how I approach this feature going forward, and I’m hesitant to say anything up here because that might not leave me with much to say for the week’s actual post-mortem section – though I will say that by the end of this season, I may have radically re-calibrated my expectations for when and how the league will pull the flex. More on that after the jump.

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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.

Read more

We’ve reached an odd point in the season: on paper there’s a decently clear divide between the good or at least mediocre teams and the bad ones, and there are enough bad teams, and feisty ones among them, that they can beat up on each other and catch some teams on a bad day and form an amorphous mass with no clear separation. There are a whopping eight teams with two wins, seven of them at 2-6, but only two, the Titans and Panthers, with only one win and three teams at three wins.

Not all of these teams are created equal; the Dolphins, our one 2-5 team, lost Tua Tagovailoa for much of the season to this point to yet another concussion, while the Browns just stunned the Ravens in their first game with Jameis Winston at quarterback, suggesting losing their $230 million signal-caller could prove to be the best thing to happen to their season. The same could be said for the three-win teams; the Cowboys may be entering a season from hell, while the Rams seem to have suffered nothing worse than “going through the entirety of the best division in football in their first seven games” and picked up a win over the previously-5-1 Vikings at the end of it. With the Bengals, on the other hand, it’s not clear which is the case; it had looked like they might have righted the ship, but then they suffered a blowout loss to the Eagles that had previously seemed to be in their own disarray.

I bring all this up because it makes putting together the graphics on this post difficult if there aren’t four games outside the featured windows involving only teams with three or more wins. For this post I’ve largely emphasized the divisions with the weakest leaders, the NFC South and West, where the teams below .500 are closer to the playoffs than other teams that might seem to have achieved similar levels of success (or lack thereof). That mostly means the Saints, but I’ve also tried to put some spotlight on the Browns in case they go on a run with Winston (certainly the networks airing their featured-window games I mentioned last week hope so).

(As an aside, it’s odd that WordPress’ block editor involves making images completely separate blocks from the surrounding paragraphs, yet images that are aligned to the side no longer force those paragraphs below them on mobile, even if there isn’t enough space for even a single word when it tries to wrap the text around the image. I’ve converted the bulk of the rest of the post to use the classic editor to attempt to get around this, but it’s clunky and doesn’t seem to work well if I save the post as a draft and attempt to come back to it later.)

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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.

Read more

I talked about this last week, but the Cleveland Browns may well have given up on their season – and put the NFL in a very difficult spot in the process, one that could make a mockery of the goals driving flex scheduling.

Last season the Browns went 11-6 and made the playoffs, but did so largely on the back of Joe Flacco, now with the Colts, not their $230 million starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, who played respectably enough (getting the Browns out to a 6-3 start) but was injured in Week 10 against the Ravens and never returned. Despite the sexual assault allegations against Watson and the quarterback that actually led the Browns to the playoffs leaving town, the NFL saw fit to give the Browns four primetime appearances, though they at least put three of them during the flex period.

Well, this year, Watson has looked like a shadow of what he looked like in Houston, making his massive contract look like one of the biggest lemons in NFL history and spawning calls among fans to start backup Jameis Winston, and the Browns have only been able to muster one win all year. Last week they traded Amari Cooper, Watson’s best weapon, to the Bills, seemingly content to tank the season and figure out how to go forward next season – and that was before Watson tore his Achilles this past Sunday, ending his season (and it says a lot that both Browns fans and football fans more generally actually cheered his injury). You wouldn’t think the league would want to feature a team like that in marquee primetime windows if they could help it – yet they may be stuck with all three of the Browns’ games in flexible windows.

Start with Browns-Broncos on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a game I wasn’t sure was a good choice to schedule for Monday night in the main flex period but more because the Broncos weren’t expected to be good than the Browns. Thanksgiving weekend typically means a paucity of good games as the Sunday slate loses two more games than normal, including the high-value Cowboys, to the holiday, and now loses a third to Black Friday. Still, the Sunday slate does have multiple games that can be flexed in, with two CBS games involving teams with non-losing records: Eagles-Ravens as their lead doubleheader game, plus Chargers-Falcons. But the Chargers and Ravens are slated to play on Monday night the previous week in the “Harbowl”. The NFL never schedules teams to play in the same primetime window in consecutive weeks (the Thursday after Thanksgiving aside) and even when flex scheduling was limited to SNF only flexed teams into that situation very rarely and in exceptional circumstances; I certainly don’t think they’d be willing to do that for Monday night where there’s already a rest mismatch. Yet if the league doesn’t want to flex in either the Chargers or Ravens, Cardinals-Vikings might be their only option to so much as involve two teams at 3-4 or better.

What may be harder to replace is Browns-Bengals on Thursday night Week 16. The NFL has tried to prop up Thursday night as much as they can, allowing teams to play two short-week games and introducing Thursday night flex scheduling, but the rules surrounding the latter preclude most games from being moved to Thursday night, and Amazon may be stuck with the sort of underwhelming game that typified TNF in the pre-Amazon era.

The real problem, though, is Dolphins-Browns the following week on SNF. This is the week where five games get set aside for a possible move to NFL Network’s Saturday tripleheader, leaving relatively few games to be pre-scheduled for CBS and Fox’s Sunday slate, and enough of those games are divisional matchups where the first half of the rivalry isn’t being played on their respective conference’s regular network, inoculating them from needing to be protected, that there are a grand total of three games on the CBS and Fox slates that are eligible for a flex, meaning only one of them actually can be flexed in – and all three have been singularly disappointing. Any of the NFL Network games can be flexed in, as was the case with Trumps-Giants a few years ago, and the starts of Washington and Denver have been surprisingly strong enough to justify featuring them, but putting an NFL Network game on NBC means NFLN itself has to dig deeper into the Saturday-eligible pool to fill out the tripleheader, potentially putting a truly dire team on their air.

Last year we saw how the new guarantees CBS and Fox get could have such an effect as to overwhelm the expansion of flexing to Monday and Thursday nights and make any flex incredibly difficult. Now we’re seeing the consequences of it: games and teams that would seem to be shoo-ins for flexes, truly dire situations involving relatively low-wattage teams the league and networks wouldn’t want to feature, and they may be stuck with them.

(Note: If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, do not attempt to rephrase the comment and re-submit it. I’m still using an antispam plugin that’s supposed to require me to approve each commenter once before their comments will go up automatically, but in practice has required me to approve every single comment. I’ve made some changes to the active plugins in hopes that it’ll clear up any plugin conflict preventing it from working properly, but I may end up just ditching this plugin for another one.)

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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for 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, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. 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.
• 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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