SNF Flex Scheduling Watch

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 12

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I’ve complained in the past about how much I often tend to struggle with filling out this opening section. That hasn’t been quite so much the case this year, but in some ways it’s grown more acute. The 506sports Discord locked itself behind Patreon at the start of the season, meaning I don’t have an antidote to the insanity of my comment section (or at least of one particular commenter), and I don’t have as much exposure to any developments or reporting that might have bearing on flex scheduling. (Though some quick Googling suggests that Mike North hasn’t done any in-season interviews of the sort he’s done the last few years.)

Here’s an example of something that might fill out this section but which would mostly be repeated in the weekly capsules: in the second installment of this year’s iteration of this feature, I noted the Dolphins’ woeful start and how it would, or wouldn’t, affect flex scheduling this year. Since then they’ve gone 3-1, with the only loss coming in Lamar Jackson’s comeback followed up by a big home win over the Bills (Miami’s first win over the Bills in three years and second in seven), and ascended to the level of mere mediocrity rather than outright disaster. Will that save their primetime appearances?

We’ll see. Part of the point of my bringing them up in Week 7 was that it was virtually impossible to flex them out of their Monday night game against the Steelers given the limited number of games capable of making that move and the questionable quality of the teams in those games, meaning that game was likely to keep its spot no matter what. More interesting would be their Sunday night tilt against the Bengals, which depends as much on what the Bengals do with Joe Burrow back as on the Dolphins. With games against the woeful Saints and Jets the next two weeks, there’s a very good chance the Dolphins will end up at 6-7 by the time the decision needs to be made (assuming the league can’t wait for the Monday night result when making a decision with six days’ notice), which I hear gets the kids all excited. Would that be enough to avoid a flex when the Bengals are already guaranteed to be worse than that?

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 11

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

Last week Joe Burrow suggested that he’d like to return on Thanksgiving night against the Ravens. This week he showed enough progress in his recovery from injury as to raise the prospect of returning sooner than that.

On both Wednesday and Thursday, Burrow was noted as a full participant in practice, which – certainly in the aftermath of the trouble the Ravens got into with their (mis)use of the “full participant” designation earlier this year – should mean not only that he put in as much work as he normally would, but that he did so with the first-team unit. In a radio interview on Thursday morning, Bengals coach Zac Taylor didn’t rule out the possibility that Burrow could start as soon as this Sunday against the Patriots. It’s a bit surprising that the Bengals would even think about bringing back Burrow that quickly with a short week immediately afterwards – I saw it suggested that one reason the Ravens didn’t trot out Jackson against the Bears despite his “full participation” was to avoid his having a short week immediately afterwards and instead have his return be on a Thursday night – but the Bengals are also dealing with a shoulder injury to Joe Flacco that has left him a limited participant in practice, so they may feel they might as well maximize the continuity at the position by bringing back Burrow rather than trot out a backup for one week.

It might be a fair question to ask why the Bengals are considering bringing Burrow back at all; at 3-7 the Bengals are a full three games back of the wild card, too far back to even show up on my playoff picture graphic, and the same distance back of the division which would seem to be the Ravens’ for the taking, so you couldn’t blame the Bengals for simply deciding to shut down for the season. But last year the Bengals were sitting at 4-8 at the start of December and won their last five down the stretch to just fall short of the playoffs, so they may feel they can do it again with a healthy Burrow and both of their games against the Ravens coming up – and it’s hard to find any wild card contenders other than the Bills and Chiefs that inspire any confidence (and in both of their cases, there’s a reason they’re not leading their divisions). But neither the Patriots on Sunday, nor the Ravens on Thanksgiving night, are going to be easy, and they may need to win at least one, maybe both, to keep their playoff hopes alive. (And it’s an open question how much Burrow can overcome the Bengals’ defense in any case; in their last three games before the bye the Bengals scored 33, 38, and 42 points, and lost two out of three with the win coming by two points. The offense has held up decently well with Flacco at the helm.)

Whatever happens, pay close attention to what the Bengals do the next few weeks. If he can stay upright and start the Bengals going on a run, it’ll be interesting to see if he can save the Bengals’ appearances in featured windows down the stretch. It’s too late for one of them, though, because on the same day the prospect of a Sunday comeback for Burrow came up, the league pulled the first significant flex-scheduling move of the year, at the Bengals’ expense.

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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Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 13 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Click here if you missed the Flex Schedule Watch on Saturday.

2025 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch
Through Week 11 (except MNF) | morganwick.com
CBS 4:25 Bills 7-3 6-4 Steelers
SNF Broncos 9-2 3-8 Washington
MNF Giants 2-9 9-2 Patriots
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/30)
FOX Rams 8-2 6-5 Panthers CAR: W12 MNF
CBS Texans 5-5 8-2 Colts @HOU: W18
FOX Vikings 4-6 7-3 Seahawks

Week 13: Even with the Vikings below .500, flexing in Vikings-Seahawks for Giants-Patriots might actually be justifiable, but flexing it in for Broncos-Cavalry might be iffy. But the question at this point is whether Fox can be convinced not to protect Rams-Panthers and whether the league thinks it’s worth a flex.

Giving a team consecutive Monday night games by flexing in a game in the second of the two weeks is more acceptable than the reverse because it doesn’t change the rest mismatch, just the total amount of rest for both teams, but I suspect it was probably still a bridge too far for the league in Week 13 last year, which could put Rams-Panthers off-limits for a Monday move. I’m also increasingly inclined to think that, given the choice between a Monday and Sunday night flex, the league would decide to keep the game pitting two big markets on the less important primetime package, especially since, as this article points out, moving games across days is especially dicey on Thanksgiving weekend when everyone is already juggling travel plans.

With Thanksgiving thinning out the slate of good games, Fox’s best 1 PM ET game if it loses Rams-Panthers would be Cardinals-Bucs, and while Vikings-Seahawks wouldn’t have markets as big as Los Angeles chewing up the distribution Fox is allowed for a late singleheader game like it did for Seahawks-Rams, nonetheless I wouldn’t expect too many people to be able to see it without Sunday Ticket or RedZone regardless of the quality of the early slate. So there’s a case to be made that Fox would actually be better off protecting Rams-Panthers – which does bring a big market of its own, albeit one lukewarm to its own teams – than Vikings-Seahawks. If that happens I think the league would stand pat and hope Jayden Daniels happens to be playing in the Sunday night game (and even if Rams-Panthers is available I suspect the league might be reticent to flex in a team with no name value that might not be as good as their record), and I also don’t think they’d flex a below-.500 team to Monday night on Thanksgiving weekend. But I don’t have a good read on this situation at all, and I wouldn’t be surprised by either game being flexed to Sunday night or Vikings-Seahawks being flexed to Monday night. Final prediction: no changes.

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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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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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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Assessing the 2025 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This year’s NFL schedule seemed to represent a shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy, going bigger in windows where you wouldn’t normally expect them to. Part of that has to do with how many teams the league has that are both good and popular, and how many of those teams play each other, thanks to the NFC East (the most popular, iconic division in football with the defending champions, the reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the single most popular team) being slated to play the NFC North (the next most popular, iconic division in football) and the AFC West (and the always-popular Chiefs plus young star quarterbacks on two other teams). The end result was that almost all the most valuable games to the TV partners were either Tier 1 or involved the Cowboys (who aren’t expected to be very good), with Packers-Steelers (and its potential matchup of Aaron Rodgers against his former team) being the only game outside those categories to be named more than once when I asked the 506sports Discord what the most valuable games were.

Mike North told CBS’ Jonathan Jones that this bounty of high-value games emboldened the league to schedule bigger in its marquee windows, but I never in a million years would have expected the league to schedule Chiefs-Cowboys, probably the two most popular teams in the league right now, on Thanksgiving, when the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game is usually the most popular regular season game of the entire year even when the opponent sucks. Normally you’d expect a game like that to provide a boon to one of the broadcast partners in a regular Sunday afternoon or primetime window, but the league seems to be coming out guns blazing to try and set the record for the most watched regular season game of all time.

Meanwhile, I don’t believe the league has ever scheduled a Tier 1 game for the final week of the regular season when there weren’t three Tier 1-worthy teams in the same division, so I thought for sure they would put the old “Cowboys-Indians” rivalry there despite being the most iconic rivalry involving the league’s most iconic team (after all, it has ended up in the final week before), but no: if form holds the top two teams in the NFC East will have an NFC Championship rematch at the site where that game was played in Week 18, potentially for the division title. (At the other end of the season, though, I wouldn’t put the decision to make the Cowboys Philadelphia’s Opening Night opponent in this category; contrary to popular belief there isn’t really any evidence that the league shies away from marquee games for Opening Night, though I don’t think they’ve gone for the biggest game of the entire year there.)

But this shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy doesn’t seem to have brought with it much of an improvement in how the league schedules the flex-scheduling period to minimize the likelihood that a big game gets stranded with regional distribution. Of course, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But with the increased protections given to CBS and Fox in the new contract that started in 2023, with each network being guaranteed half of each division rivalry and a minimum number of games for the most desirable teams in their respective conference, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I’ve come to realize that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.

(I should note that the division rivalry rule does have some wiggle room, even beyond North’s comments from last year. After all of last year’s Week 18 games were rematches of games slated for the “proper” network, this year Browns-Bengals is scheduled for Week 18 with the game in Cleveland on Fox, and after what happened to Texans-Colts two years ago I’m not going to assume it’s off-limits to a move to NBC or ESPN. More surprisingly, the Cardinals and Seahawks are slated to have one meeting on CBS and the other on a Thursday night, and those are two teams expected to be around .500 so that matchup might be just good enough for Tier 6. But I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that those cases both have one matchup on the other conference’s network, and they aren’t so high-powered that it’s implausible for CBS and Fox to approve of those moves. I don’t think it means the league has the freedom to flex in division-rivalry games or that CBS and Fox have to protect them if they’re rematches of games on another network, given we have firm evidence otherwise. Not that the league can’t flex in such games – see the link above – but it needs to be worth CBS or Fox’s while.)

With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Christmas, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16

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Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Christmas day games.

Here’s something I could have put in this section last week but didn’t: last week Mike Tirico appeared on Jimmy Traina’s podcast and suggested the league adopt a Premier League-style scheduling model for the last month or so of the season, where games are complete free agents only assigned to windows and networks when the time comes to make flex decisions on each one. Tirico thinks “it would really benefit everybody to just kind of put placeholders in”, but realistically I don’t think the networks would stand for that depending on where they are in the pecking order for choosing games. (I’d think what he really meant was that it would benefit his employer specifically, except that of the three featured windows on Sunday and Monday last week, NBC was probably most satisfied with what they got.) The doubleheader network would still get priority for their late afternoon game, but all the other half-decent games would be siphoned away to other networks. Networks care about their 1 PM ET windows too, and at the very least the singleheader network needs a good game of some kind; this approach would basically amount to abolishing protections, and maybe even the division rivalry rule, in the last month of the season.

The league pretended this was how it worked in the first year of flex scheduling in 2006, listing all Sunday games at 1 PM, 4:05 PM, or 4:25 PM ET based solely on what time zone the game was being played in and (for West Coast games) whether the network it would be on under the old rigid road-team-based rules had the singleheader or doubleheader, implying the best of the unprotected games would go to NBC. In reality, NBC always had a tentative game penciled in, and in 2007 and subsequent years this tentative game was marked in the schedule from the start. All the networks want some idea of what games they’re going to get, if only to promote them for advertisers.

I don’t think the situation we had last week would have gone much better if this “free agent” system was in place but the Saturday games were still fixed, Fox was still guaranteed Eagles-Swing States, and they could still protect Vikings-Seahawks. If Broncos-Chargers still got flexed to TNF in mid-November, the three best games available two weeks out would have actually been the three games that were already in the featured windows. Now, you could argue that’s a sign of the league’s hubris in taking the Netflix deal and adding two more featured windows to the four it already had, but it still points to how the protection and division-rivalry rules are the real obstacles here to creating a decent, balanced schedule, and how if the league can’t solve that problem, the only solution is to take more care in constructing the schedule in May.

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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