What Would a Conference-Free NFL Television Schedule Look Like?

Last month, Variety reported that the NFL was looking into the possibility of decoupling its Sunday afternoon television contracts from each conference in its next television contract beyond 2022 (no link because Variety’s site is too ad-laden and required me to reload something like three times before I could actually read the article; here’s a brief summary). I could swear I at least saw speculation to that effect during or even before last season, because I’m pretty sure I had the idea for this post back then, but I couldn’t find anything and nothing I saw passing on the Variety report tied it to anything earlier, and in any case it might have just been the sort of baseless speculation my commenters like to get into. If the Variety report is the first time this has come to light, it’s worth noting that the specific phrasing used in the report was that Fox and CBS “could get to air packages that include games from both the NFC and AFC, as opposed to the current system, which keeps the NFC on Fox and the AFC on CBS”, so it’s not even clear that it would mean more than an expansion of the current cross-flex system as opposed to the full decoupling it’s easy to interpret it as (assuming anything like this comes to fruition at all, which it might not).

If the NFL does completely sever Fox and CBS’ respective slates of games from conference affiliation, it would do away with what might seem like an archaic relic of the days before the AFL-NFL merger, but it would also pose a considerable logistical challenge. The NFL is unique among major professional sports leagues in the United States in that television production and distribution for all 256 games are handled by national networks; any game not selected to air in primetime is produced by Fox or CBS for regional distribution in one of their Sunday afternoon timeslots. If which network gets which game isn’t determined by which conference the road team is from, what does determine it?

There are a few different approaches the NFL could take if it adopts this idea, and a few different places they could look to for guidance. Something like what the Big Ten has with Fox and ESPN, where Fox gets its pick of weeks it wants to pick ahead of ESPN and ABC that it picks out all at once, probably wouldn’t fly in the NFL, certainly not if the league were to maintain the current Super Bowl rotation. CBS isn’t getting left with the dregs of the schedule left over after Fox and NBC take all the good games, with the weakest feature games in all of its doubleheader weeks. What’s more likely is that Fox and CBS agree to pay closer to equal rights fees for relatively even-handed access to the best non-primetime games.

Below is the result of my attempt to figure out what this might look like in practice based on the recently-released 2019 schedule, assuming the NFL keeps its current partners with their current packages and their current schedule structure beyond this change. I followed the following principles, which are just one idea for how it might work and at best is an oversimplification:

• For simplicity, I took all the games slated for time slots outside Sunday afternoon – the primetime, London, and Thanksgiving games – as given, and assumed all Sunday afternoon games would stay in the week they’re in in the actual schedule. In reality, the exact schedule would be the result of a push and pull between Fox, CBS, NBC, and whatever other partners the NFL has.
• Each network would have a choice of weeks 1-16 that it wants to get first pick of games to place in the featured slot of the doubleheader, leaving the other network with the singleheader. CBS is getting the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game this year, so Fox gets the first pick of Sunday afternoons. The choice of weeks goes in “snake” order, so Fox’s pick is followed by two CBS picks, then two Fox picks, and so on, while the choice of games within a week alternates between networks, so after Fox chooses its main national game CBS chooses its main singleheader game, then Fox chooses its main early game, then CBS picks again, and so on (this has the result that West Coast games cannot be the second or third pick). This would result in the two networks either having an equal number of games, or the doubleheader network having one more game, which is usually, but not always, the case in reality; I’m holding to that for this hypothetical schedule.
• At least to start, no network may air more than four home games and eight games overall from a single team. Conversely, each network must air at least two home games and four games overall from a single team; in other words, if a team is maxed out on primetime appearances, at least one or two of those games must come from each network. Finally, no network may air more than half of a team’s games against its division rivals. Thursday Night Football and NFL Network games do not count towards Fox’s total for this purpose, but Thanksgiving games do count for both networks. This means that in most weeks, at least some games will be “forced” onto one network or the other, resulting in picks being forfeited from the end of the order.

Even given the caveats noted above, this schedule is not quite what I would prefer – I was partway through the process when I started paying more attention to preserving doubleheaders for two-team markets (ideally, home games in such markets would always air on the doubleheader network unless both teams in the market are playing at home on the same day at the same time, or in the case of Los Angeles, if the league and networks really, really want LA to get the feature game), and might have picked different doubleheader weeks for different networks had I been thinking that far ahead at the start. (Certainly the schedule itself is likely to be different as a result of these considerations alone.)

Generally, games are listed in the order that they were picked, except for games forced to one network or the other, which are listed at the point where they were forced. This mostly just means that the game each network features in each timeslot is listed first, since I removed any indication of which games were forced and had to do a considerable bit of shuffling of already-picked games to get everything to fit.