SNF Flex Scheduling Watch

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday or Saturday night games.

Perhaps predictably, over the past week social media has erupted with people moaning about why Dolphins-Ravens, the game likely to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, is trapped in the early singleheader, why it wasn’t moved to 4:25 or Sunday night. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in recent years, and CBS sure is trying its best to show it to as much of the country as possible, but it is notable that even leaving aside the jockeying between networks and the increased protections CBS and Fox get in the new contracts, this game could have easily been moved to the late afternoon and stayed on CBS. Instead, before any of last week’s games were even played CBS opted to stick with the Burrow-less disappointing Bengals against the Chiefs. Lo and behold, once the week’s results played out the Bengals’ win streak with Jake Browning at quarterback had come to an abrupt halt, leaving the Bengals hanging on to the possibility of a playoff spot by a thread, and the Chiefs had stumbled to the Raiders, keeping the silver and black’s own threadbare playoff hopes alive and nearly locking the Chiefs into the 3 seed, especially when coupled with Dolphins and Ravens wins against two of the best teams in the NFC.

It’s a reminder that as much as the NFL has a nationalized fanbase, the people who want to watch the best, most important games between the best teams, at least in the regular season, are still a distinct minority compared to those that just want to watch the teams they’re fans of or the most attractive, biggest-name teams. A Chiefs game this year always carries the possibility of a Taylor Swift bump, but even without the Swift factor the Chiefs are one of the three most attractive teams in the league right now, by far the most attractive in the AFC, the most dominant team in the league in recent years with some of its biggest stars. They’re not the Cowboys – if the Chiefs-Patriots game that got flexed out earlier this year for Eagles-Seahawks had been Cowboys-Patriots I think it keeps its spot – but they are one of those teams that can pop a rating by their mere presence. On the flip side, let’s not forget that the Dolphins produced one of the worst December Sunday Night Football ratings ever when they were flexed in down the stretch of last season – contributing to the league’s decision to plug Lions-Packers into Sunday night of Week 18 instead of a game that wouldn’t become meaningless for one team by the time it kicked off. Couple that with the Bengals and Chiefs still being very much in the playoff hunt, and that’s why my prediction last week was that if Dolphins-Ravens was going to be moved to a later time at all, it would be into Sunday night, not the late afternoon window.

That being said, while the games scheduled for featured windows before the season are determined as much by popularity as by how they’re expected to perform, the flexible scheduling regime is still governed by how good the teams are. The game originally scheduled for a primetime window will keep its spot unless there’s a compelling reason to move out of it, but if it is flexed out the game that replaces it will generally be determined by what game has the best pair of records, and there have been times when a passable game scheduled for Sunday night has nonetheless been flexed out in favor of a game that seemed to be too good to be as weakly distributed as it otherwise would have been. Mike North has repeatedly stated in recent seasons that the league wants to give every playoff team exposure in national windows before the playoffs so that audiences have some familiarity with the team before the playoffs hit – obscure, unpopular, yet good teams aren’t going to become more popular if they continue to languish in obscurity. So the NFL does try to put the best games in the best windows.

Well, Dolphins-Ravens ranked #4 on my list of Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t that I wrote before the season, where I even raised the prospect of it being flexed in for Packers-Vikings. In my tier structure based on preseason win totals at sportsbooks I introduced a few weeks ago, it was a Tier 2 game, meaning if the best games of the year were distributed evenly, it would be the second-best game of its week. Given the poor ratings for the Dolphins on SNF last year and the perception that the AFC North was still the Bengals’ to lose, I can’t completely fault the league for not putting the game in a featured window to begin with, but I can fault the league for scheduling it this late in the season but punting it to the early doubleheader while giving the Sunday night timeslot to a game involving a Packers team expected to finish below .500, New Year’s Eve or no. The league had to be aware that if things played out exactly as expected, CBS would have two games between big-time playoff contenders with win totals no lower than 9.5 while SNF would have a game involving a team on the fringes of the playoff picture at best, yet because CBS was scheduled for only eight Chiefs appearances the league wouldn’t be able to flex either one in. To be sure, the league and CBS couldn’t have figured that, while CBS would have the game between the AFC’s two best teams, it wouldn’t be the one they thought it’d be. Still, I feel like while the league and its TV partners can mess around with games involving popular teams for the first three months of the season, once December hits they need to stop messing around. If the flexible windows don’t contain what are expected to be the best games of their respective weeks, not counting games in featured inflexible windows, then the games that are the best need to be in a position where they can be flexed in, period. At the very least, if they’re serious about “playing your way into primetime” they need to minimize the risk of something like this happening.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16

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

So despite my use of a “cheat sheet” after what happened in 2021 this post came pretty close to going the same way. I’m inclined to blame it on the problems I ran into trying to fly to Seattle, but I still didn’t spend any time working on this on Friday. Maybe I should see if I can find a way to start working on this another week in advance? But the combinations involved multiply exponentially another week out.

One thing that occurred to me while I was working on the Week 17 section (before Thursday’s news) was that the eight-game minimum that applied to Cowboys games on Fox almost certainly doesn’t apply across the board. Only eleven out of 30 teams on my primetime appearance count list were scheduled to air on their respective conference’s network more than eight times, which would severely limit the league’s ability to pull the flex; notably, the Seahawks are among the teams scheduled for only eight Fox games, so flexing them in for Chiefs-Patriots would seem to have put them below the minimum. It had always been reported that CBS and Fox could choose a certain number of teams to air a minimum number of times on their air, but without any firm measure of what those numbers are I think there was a tendency to assume that the former number would apply across the board just to simplify things, avoid having to figure out what those teams were, and align with CBS and Fox maintaining their overall conference affiliations (and I think some things some executives said may have contributed to that perception), but clearly there is a discretionary element involved here. (That said, I suspect there is a smaller minimum that does apply across the board.) Eight games makes sense as the overall minimum to apply to the teams the networks choose, and the number of teams they can choose is probably pretty low for the Steelers to be scheduled for only seven CBS games, but even before Swiftmania came to Kansas City the Chiefs were probably one of the teams CBS did choose, which has relevance to the Week 17 flex because it removes any remaining doubt that they protected Dolphins-Ravens.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 15

On Monday the New York Post‘s Andrew Marchand sent a newsletter exploring “why more flex has meant less flex” for the league this year. It’s locked behind a paywall so I haven’t read it myself, but I can give you the big takeaway that was relayed to the 506sports Discord: that what I had thought was a no-brainer flex actually involved an excruciating amount of horse-trading (and would have involved it even if it had remained a no-brainer). Fox is scheduled for eight Cowboys games, the exact number they were guaranteed to have between Week 1 and Week 17 (i.e., not including Week 18), so they protected Eagles-Seahawks, not Cowboys-Bills. To convince Fox to release that protection, the league adhered to their request to have Bears-Browns on their air and did not move it to Saturday on NFL Network, moving Vikings-Bengals instead. This puts a lot of recent and semi-recent developments in perspective:

• Most immediately, this probably explains why the week’s flexes were announced on Thursday: the deal that was reached effectively locked the league into a certain course of action regardless of the week’s results.
• In retrospect, Mike North’s comments a couple weeks ago to the effect of “we only flex out of a game if it doesn’t have playoff implications” may have been intended to prime NFL fans for the possibility that Chiefs-Patriots wouldn’t be flexed out. That may seem odd when North made clear to Jimmy Traina that flexing out of Chiefs-Patriots was a possibility, but this is probably where the sense Rob Tornoe got that such a flex was “unlikely” came from.
• The combination of the “plans to protect” phrasing and the timing of this tweet suggested to me that CBS and Fox were able to protect games up to two weeks in advance, but here Marchand is saying Fox had protected a game at least three weeks in advance. Another reading of the tweet would be that Fox “planned to protect” a game within the next 24 hours, which would be in keeping with a three-week protection window, but even then you’d expect Marchand to report on the league trying to convince Fox not to protect Eagles-Seahawks, not trying to convince them to release an existing protection. Perhaps the league was thinking of flexing out of Chargers-Raiders and that’s when protections were submitted? (Some people on the 506sports Discord suggested to me that CBS and Fox could protect games once the league told them they were thinking of pulling a flex, but a) that’s not quite in keeping with North’s comments in May that CBS and Fox could protect games “before we even start to think about” pulling a flex, and b) that would be impossible for me to work with not knowing when the league would actually send CBS and Fox formal notice of their intention to pull a flex, especially since they’d have incentive to do it as early as possible to maximize the possibility of CBS and Fox protecting the wrong games.)
• This makes it all the more bewildering that Cowboys-Sheriffs in Week 18 would be a rematch of the Thanksgiving game on CBS. It would effectively guarantee Fox a ninth Cowboys game, yet not provide any relief from the eight-game minimum.
• So, what does this mean for the Steelers being scheduled for only seven CBS games before the season, or the Bucs being scheduled for only seven Fox games, especially the former?

There’s even less in the way of clear solutions for this problem than there was for the problems raised by the guaranteed-division-rivalry rule; I don’t think Fox would stand for having all their Cowboys games (except for Thanksgiving in years they have it) crammed in early in the season before the main flex period starts, and I’m not sure the league’s other partners would want all their Cowboys games to fall late in the season either. (And make no mistake: Fox would only get the minimum eight Cowboys games in most years. If the Cowboys are so much as mediocre they’d be scheduled for the maximum six pre-flex primetime games, and CBS is going to want a couple Cowboys games of their own.)

It’s worth noting, though, that it’s not as though the league couldn’t have guessed that they might want to flex Eagles-Seahawks in for Chiefs-Patriots. When the schedule came out, the Patriots’ win total at sportsbooks was 7.5, while the Seahawks’ was 8.5. To be sure, that’s only a one-game difference which isn’t normally enough for me to consider a flex, and it suggests most people didn’t expect the Patriots to be quite this bad, but it wouldn’t have taken much variation from those totals to justify a flex, and the Seahawks had made the playoffs the previous season while the Pats hadn’t. (Before the season I divide the schedule into 18-game “tiers” based on the win total of the worse team in the game. Eagles-Seahawks fell into tier 4, meaning if games were scheduled for featured windows solely based on expected record, it would have at least been good enough for TNF or the lead game in the 1 PM window, and might have snuck in to a truly featured window to allow for some variety in the teams featured. The Patriots, meanwhile, weren’t expected to be good enough to make the top six tiers.) And it’s not as though this was expected to be a split-national late window, not with the Cowboys involved playing what had been one of the AFC’s powerhouses; the Cowboys had the lower win total in that game of 9.5. So there’s probably something to be said for the league doing a lot more to ensure games involving teams expected to be at or above .500, especially on the West Coast, are, if not scheduled for featured windows (or at least as the lead game in their window) to begin with, at least in a position where they can be flexed in if desired, if they’re going to be scheduled for the main flex period.

Beyond that, maybe a tweak to the protection rules themselves could be warranted. Perhaps the league could mandate that the game the doubleheader network protects must be either a) scheduled for 1 PM ET or b) have the network’s lead broadcast team on the game, or at least have large enough distribution as to take a substantial chunk out of the feature game if it’s not the feature game itself, unless the league allows the network to do otherwise. In other words, the doubleheader network can’t use a protection to hoard a game it doesn’t intend to widely distribute, even if the appearance-minimum or guaranteed-division-rivalry rules mean they don’t have to protect their actual featured game.

What’s become increasingly apparent as the year has gone along is that CBS and Fox may have pulled a fast one on the league’s other partners, and maybe on the league itself. The additional protections they won, some of which were nominally more related to Sunday afternoon games becoming “free agents”, have turned out to substantially outweigh the expansion of flexible scheduling to Thursday and Monday nights, greatly restricting their ability to benefit from flexible scheduling. I’d like to think the league had some idea of the effect these rules were going to have on flex scheduling – just look at how many times CBS and Fox had protected division-rivalry games where the other half was scheduled on another network to see how the guaranteed-division-rivalry rule was going to affect things – but I wonder if, in retrospect, removing the requirement for CBS and Fox to leave one week unprotected was a mistake. There are weeks where I legitimately don’t know what the singleheader network would want to protect, but nonetheless they surely would anyway.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 13

I thought I might have a chance to get this post up before we got too far into the Thursday night game, but the NFL caught me off guard by announcing Week 15 flexes for both Saturday and Monday night on Thursday afternoon. Possible this was driven by the desire not to cut it too close to announce the Saturday games, but regardless there wasn’t any reason not to announce this as early as Tuesday. I think I’m going to have to commit to posting these on Wednesday at the very latest from now on, at least until only six-day flexes are left, if I can find a way to bring myself to do that and have my brain in sufficient working order to do so. I’m going to try to capture my thinking prior to this announcement (and the chart also doesn’t reflect today’s news) and why that makes it all the more surprising.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 12

I ended up putting out the Week 11 Flex Schedule Watch post about halfway through Sunday’s early games, so if you haven’t read it, do. I have a lot of thoughts about Mike North’s comments on various platforms over the weekend, including his insistence that flex scheduling is there to ensure games with playoff implications in every window, seemingly to the point that one of the worst teams in the NFL would keep its spot if the team they’re playing is in the thick of the playoff hunt. What we’ll be paying attention to over the last month-plus of the season is how much that actually reflects the league’s approach. In the meantime, this post covers both the Monday night flex scheduling situation for Week 14 and the Thursday night flex scheduling situation for Week 17. 

Read moreLast-Minute Remarks on NFL Flex Scheduling Decisions Following Week 12

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of any of the Thanksgiving or Black Friday games, or the first half of the early Sunday games.

There’s a good reason for my lateness this week: NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning Mike North made the rounds with appearances on a pair of relatively prominent national podcasts on Tuesday, taking interviews on both the Peter King Podcast and Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Podcast with some revealing tidbits about the NFL’s thinking with regards to flex scheduling… but I’m not sure how thankful I am of them. I’m going to take the unusual step of putting my thoughts after the jump, which also will mean after the breakdown of the flex schedule rules.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 11

Week 13: Given the name value that both teams in the Sunday night game bring, the Packers’ win likely shuts the door on what little chance there was that it would be flexed out, leaving the Burrow-less Bengals against the Jaguars on Monday night. You could make the argument that the three-game gap between the Lions and Saints isn’t disqualifying and that it’s silly for me to think it would be better for the team with the better record to be worse when the worse team is still .500. The bigger problem, though, is that with Washington’s loss to the lowly Giants, flexing in Lions-Saints would leave Falcons-Jets and Dolphins-Trumps as Fox’s best options in the early window.

The other option would be to see if CBS can be convinced not to protect Broncos-Texans; the rest of the CBS slate is weak enough that Bengals-Jaguars might well be the best game on their slate if it’s flexed to them, but I’m not sure it’s worth it for any of the parties involved, especially since CBS would need a replacement 4:05 game. (In fact that might be the best argument in favor of a flex, as Broncos-Texans is clearly the second- or third-best of the Sunday afternoon games, and the best CBS game by a mile, but is limited in its distribution in the late singleheader; perhaps the LA teams can switch networks to improve Niners-Eagles’ distribution?) I could be wrong but I’m not sure the league is quite satisfied with the options available to them to pull the trigger on the first Monday night flex in a purely speculative move, even if we have pretty good reason to think the Bengals will stink without Burrow; the league has always been pretty conservative in its flexing decisions. Final prediction: No changes.

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game… mostly. See the Week 13 section for how late-breaking news could affect flex decisions in the very near term.

On Tuesday 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco tweeted that Fox “plans to protect” the Week 13 Niners-Eagles game. This was noteworthy not so much for the news itself – considering the game was already slated to be Fox’s lead late doubleheader game even before last year’s NFC Championship Game participants became the last two unbeaten teams in the league and remain the top two teams in the conference, it was pretty much an inevitability – as the timing of the tweet, coupled with the “plans to protect” phrasing indicating that Fox hadn’t already done so.

Based on my reading of the words of Mike North and Michael Mulvihill – especially North’s claim that CBS and Fox submit protections “before we even start to think about” flexing out games – I had figured that while protections in the main flex period were no longer due in Week 5, they weren’t necessarily due at the same time the league needed to make the decision like with the early flex. At minimum, I figured that with TNF flexing in place, protections in the main flex period had to kick in at the same time as the deadline for that, five weeks in advance. But if Fox only “plan[ned] to protect” Niners-Eagles now, less than 19 days before game time, that suggests that the deadline for protections is no earlier than three weeks in advance, and more likely runs right up to the point where the league itself needs to make a decision.

I don’t know how this interacts with the TNF flex, though it is notable that the league’s contracts with CBS and Fox were negotiated without any assumption that the TNF flex (still first publicly floated less than a year ago) would be a thing, and recent history has shown that the NFL prefers to make sure all three of the Sunday afternoon windows – the early doubleheader as well as the singleheader and late DH – have at least half-decent games anchoring them even though the doubleheader network still has only one protection, so CBS and Fox could well be protected against losing games that are too good without any formal protections at all, especially given the restrictions on what games can be flexed into TNF. But that seems doubtful, so does this mean the league can force CBS and Fox to protect games earlier than they’d otherwise like by floating the possibility of a TNF flex, or does it mean CBS and Fox can change what game they elect to protect, so they can protect one game from TNF and another game from SNF and MNF even if the game protected from TNF isn’t in the running to be flexed in? And how does this interact with the six-day SNF flex, do networks still need to protect games two weeks in advance or can they still do it right up until a decision has to be made?

I’m going to keep waiting on any more clarification on how protection works now before committing to any changes to the Flex Schedule Watch until the start of next season’s Watch, and I’m actually still going to adhere to the five-week window for the remainder of this season, but absent any further information I am going to work under the assumption of a two-week protection window starting next season, without any firm protection commitments associated with the TNF flex.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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.
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Read moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

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

On this week’s “Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast”, SportsBusiness Journal’s John Ourand explained how the rule guaranteeing CBS and Fox one-half of each division rivalry is hindering the league’s ability to flex out of bad games by seemingly confirming that CBS and Fox don’t have to protect games if they’re the only half of a division rivalry they’re scheduled to get:

Who's Down this week?
Have you seen the NFL's Week 10 schedule?

Listen to the Marchand & Ourand Sports Media Podcast here:
Apple: https://t.co/sW7aL3vyxv
Spotify: https://t.co/ZMCSAzIFye
Google: https://t.co/5KgIqq3sxC pic.twitter.com/Oiu747fxhQ

— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) November 9, 2023

Now, I’m not sure how much that rule has to do with the bad primetime games we’ve already gotten. Besides a number of games not falling in flexible windows, even with the guaranteed-division-rivalry rule it’s not like the league was lacking in alternatives to Bears-Chargers Week 8. It would have required some back-and-forth crossflexing to accommodate both the Rams and Chargers without giving CBS too many games in the late window, but that shouldn’t have been too much of an obstacle unless, as I’ve decided, the early flex is meant to be a very rare exception to the games it applies to being non-flexible, to be used only when an injury to a star player makes it truly dire and not as marketable as it used to be. But that may not be as much the case as I’ve thought: this week’s Jets-Raiders game apparently got to the point of the networks issuing protections, with Fox reportedly protecting Niners-Jaguars despite not moving it to the late window or otherwise moving away from Giants-Cowboys as their lead late game, because the Cowboys-Giants half of the rivalry had already aired on NBC. (On that note, shortly after the bit in the clip Marchand and Ourand were reminded that there are three games between teams with winning records this week, including Niners-Jaguars… and all three are in the early window, and in fact all three are on Fox so no one will be getting more than one of them without Sunday Ticket.) And the rule certainly is greatly limiting the league’s options in the main flex period, as we’ve had plenty of opportunity to explore in this space.

What would I do about it? Really, there’s not much that can be done beyond taking more care in the construction of the schedule. One thing I would do is space out divisional games as evenly as possible across the season. Each division has 12 divisional games, two of which have to be played Week 18; multiply by eight divisions and that’s 80 games over 17 weeks, or about five a week with five weeks getting four. Those five weeks, if possible, should all be in the main flex period. In addition, for any division game scheduled for one of the primetime packages, CBS or Fox’s half of those games should be scheduled for September or October before the main flex period kicks in, and games with one half scheduled for Week 18 should have the other half scheduled either in the first half of the season, or very late in the season, around Week 15-16, so the league has some idea of the likelihood that the Week 18 game will be suitable/desirable for a move to NBC or ESPN. Balancing all of that is not necessarily practical, and might not be desirable for CBS or Fox, but I feel like it should be a goal the league should aspire towards.

Of course, there’s a reason Fox didn’t back out of a game involving the woeful Giants as its lead late game in favor of Niners-Jaguars or any of the other games involving teams with winning records: how good a team is doesn’t necessarily correlate that well with how desirable the games involving them are.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night 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.
• 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 moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9