NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

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On Monday the NFL announced that Jaguars-Giants would be switching places with Steelers-Eagles and replace it as CBS’ lead doubleheader game Week 11. I didn’t fully cover it here because this feature is primarily about the league’s official flex scheduling windows – Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights, plus the late-season Saturday slates – with 4:25 only covered as a bonus addendum as it can be harder to predict and less likely to change. Part of the reason it’s less likely to change is because the 4:25 window tends to emphasize big brands, markets, and stars more than actually good teams; a team like the Jaguars can be scheduled for games in each of the primetime windows after a divisional-round run last year, but it’d take a lot more than that for them to ever sniff a lead 4:25 game, at least when the schedule’s initially announced.

So while Jaguars-Giants would seem to be the clear choice to flex in on record alone, after what happened (or rather, didn’t happen) last year I wasn’t convinced that the Jaguars would ever be flexed into any flexible window with an established tentative game, and certainly not the 4:25 window where its status as the Anti-Cowboys would hurt them all the more, which is why I thought last week that CBS was more likely to just promote Raiders-Broncos to the lead game. But I might have been more open to the possibility if I’d known this:

That’s right: in a window that emphasizes brands and stars above all else, 31 of the 32 NFL teams have been lead games in the last eight and a half years, and the 32nd team represents a big enough market that its failure to appear is more about their lack of success in that span than anything else. Even the Colts, who saw their 2020 game against the Packers get the bulk of distribution and the Buck-Aikman team over Cowboys-Vikings. Even the Cardinals, who had a road game against the Cowboys assigned the lead team in 2021. Even the Titans, perhaps the second-least-valuable team in the league, though that comes with the caveat that Titans-Texans in 2019 fell in Week 17 when it was still the final week of the season and playoff implications actually do trump name value there, which is probably the only way that game gets the lead crew over Steelers-Ravens.

So you could argue that, while the 4:25 window does emphasize brands and stars, it’s not that important as the season goes along and a low-wattage but good team can still find their way there if the circumstances warrant. However, I still could have found reason to be skeptical. The Colts and Cardinals games were against the two most valuable teams in the league, and while the Giants are certainly a valuable, big-market team that can always justify a spot in the late doubleheader window, they aren’t the Cowboys or Packers. Notably, that 2018 Jaguars game was also against the Cowboys, with an additional late doubleheader game earlier in the season against the Tom Brady Patriots, a year after Blake Bortles took the Jaguars to the AFC Championship Game before falling to the Patriots. Would CBS really have been willing to take on a Jaguars game against a team with strong but not top-tier name value? I might have decided it was worth going with over Raiders-Broncos, but frankly I might have thought CBS’ preference would be to stick with Steelers-Eagles even with the Eagles in a tailspin.

So, does this remove the last objection to flexing in Jaguars-Bears Week 13? Maybe not. Last Wednesday Mike Tirico appeared on ESPN Chicago’s Waddle and Silvy show, and starting at 25:20 (or thereabouts), engaged in his own bit of flex scheduling speculation. While no specific games were mentioned (other than Pats-Chargers), his conclusion was that a Bears game being flexed in at any point this season was unlikely because of all the rules restricting flexing and all the other windows taking away games. But the Jaguars game has stood out enough, even by the time the interview was conducted, that I feel like the hosts dropped the ball by not asking a follow-up about it. More on what could be going on there in the appropriate section.

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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven 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 no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
  • 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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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I think going forward I’m going to target Wednesday afternoon-Thursday morning for the Flex Schedule Watch unless there’s a good reason to post it earlier. Last week’s post went up on Wednesday morning, a few hours before 506sports posted its coverage maps for the week, and that produced enough backlash to how little coverage Browns-Steelers was getting compared to Ravens-Bills to spur Grok to produce a trending summary on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, when I hadn’t realized how much anticipation there was for that game. I called out how the league set itself up to be unable to pull the flex even in situations that would normally clearly call for it last week, so this week I’m going to defend the league and why it and its network partners were relatively fine with Browns-Steelers getting little coverage outside the territory of the participating teams and, weirdly, the South.

While Browns-Steelers was for first place in the AFC North, stakes and actual good teams don’t drive ratings nearly as much as brands and stars. Last year’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game was the Super Bowl rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs, way back in Week 2, followed by the modern Brady-Manning rivalry between the Chiefs and Bills; the 6-11 Chiefs played in four of the five most-watched games of the year. The most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game not to involve the Chiefs was Eagles-Bills Week 17, pitting a big market against Josh Allen. NBC’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving game by Nielsen standards was the Kickoff Game between the Eagles and the almighty Cowboys, while its most-watched Sunday night game was the Lions and Chiefs in Week 6, two teams that ultimately missed the playoffs; that and Bears-Niners Week 17 were the only Sunday night games to outpace Packers-Cowboys Week 4. As much as I defended the decision to give the Sunday night slot Week 18 to Ravens-Steelers over Seahawks-49ers, the latter game earned more viewers for ESPN and ABC than any Sunday night game last year, and two million more than Ravens-Steelers; the most watched Monday night game was a Week 3 contest between the Ravens and Lions, again, two non-playoff teams. Outside of Christmas, Amazon’s most-watched regular season game of the year was the week-after-Thanksgiving game between the Cowboys and Lions. The same teams crop up again and again at the top of each package’s list of most-watched games, and there isn’t that much of a correlation with the best teams or even teams that made the playoffs.

All of which means that, for all the brouhaha over flexible scheduling, if you simply divvied up the games between the teams with the biggest fanbases across the league’s marquee windows, the TV partners would probably be fine without any flexing. Even with both teams having mediocre-at-best seasons, if you hooked up NBC executives to truth serum, they’d tell you they’d much prefer to have Eagles-Quinns over Browns-Steelers. As for CBS, last year I made the point that every game has value to CBS and Fox even if they’re buried on the depth chart, but you might still think that swapping out Browns-Steelers for Eagles-Quinns would be a net positive… but putting Washington in the 1 PM window wouldn’t add as many viewers as you might think given the considerable crossover of fanbases for each other’s teams in the Baltimore and Washington markets. You’d have to either put it at 4:25 as an undercard to Chiefs-Broncos, or put it on Fox and engage in some crossflexing. That’s not even getting into how having Ravens-Bills and Browns-Steelers on the same network at the same time helps YouTube to sell Sunday Ticket. A less valuable game, or even one not involving Washington, might well have seen CBS be willing to relinquish Browns-Steelers, but the networks are more than fine with the way things played out.

Would the league prefer to showcase potential future playoff teams than continue to shove the NFC East down viewers’ throats even as it looks like it might be the NFC Least? Sure, but even then there might be some within the league that are relieved that they didn’t create a national showcase for DeShaun Watson and all his controversy in the middle of the season where one wasn’t pre-scheduled. Frankly, I still don’t quite believe there was any real clamor for a Week 8 game between the Browns and Steelers, division lead on the line or no, to get a national audience. As I mentioned last week, the real problem is that the hype surrounding flex scheduling creates expectations for which games are given national audiences that doesn’t align with the reality of what the networks value. The league may have had to lay in the bed that it made, but ultimately, this was the schedule it wanted and it’s the schedule it got, with or without the Browns outperforming expectations.

(A brief note before we begin: I’m not covering Week 11 because the Sunday night game that week is from Mexico City and not flexible even if the teams involved didn’t have two losses between them, but there’s a very real possibility that CBS bails out of Steelers-Eagles as its lead late game. At this point, though, if it happens I fully expect them to promote Raiders-Broncos to the lead spot, even if the Raiders lose this week, if only because it wouldn’t require asking the league to move any games around, and it totally doesn’t have anything to do with their best early game, Jaguars-Giants, involving the Anti-Cowboys.)

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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven 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 no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
  • 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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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This could be said about just about any season under the current contract, but this might go down as the season where CBS and Fox’s additional protections against flexing, and the league’s refusal to schedule with flex scheduling in mind, officially bite the league in the ass – with an assist from its own hubris.

Let’s start with the Philadelphia Eagles, who officially shut down Jalen Hurts for the season last week after the blood clot found in his calf turned into more blood clots in his lungs. The NFC East is shaping up to be the league’s top candidate for tire-fire status, but the Eagles could still end up essentially out of it by the end of the season, and the league clearly felt that that, coupled with Washington’s 1-4-1 start, made the game between those teams this coming week enough of a potential drag on Sunday Night Football that they attempted to have CBS waive its right to air one half of Browns-Steelers. But now that Hurts is done for the year, the league is stuck with two Eagles games in standalone windows that can’t be flexed at all: at the Cowboys on Thanksgiving, and at home to the Seahawks on Saturday, December 19.

Their games in featured windows that can be changed aren’t much better. Steelers-Eagles is CBS’ lead late doubleheader game Week 11, but I don’t know how much CBS is willing to pivot to Raiders-Broncos as their new lead game (especially with the Raiders now on a four-game losing streak), and I know they don’t want to put on Jaguars-Giants and showcase the Anti-Cowboys, even as a matchup between two 4-2(-1) teams. Texans-Eagles is the Week 16 Thursday night game, and the Texans may well contribute as much to that game being questionable as the Eagles do, but the only games that can be flexed into TNF that week involve teams that are 2-5 at best, no better than the Eagles at the moment – and perhaps more importantly, while that game is technically flexible, that night is Christmas Eve, so the league would be highly reticent to ruin two teams’ Christmases on relatively short notice. The following week’s Sunday night game is a potentially nastily lopsided Eagles-Niners contest, but again, the only available options aren’t likely to be any better.

But at least the Eagles are a big-market NFC East team with a big fanbase. Then there’s the league’s last winless team, the 0-6 Los Angeles Chargers, technically a big market team but without much of a fanbase to speak of there. Because the Chargers have been perennial playoff contenders in recent years, they’ve been identified for a number of featured windows, though only three official primetime appearances, one of which is on Monday night just outside of the main flex window. That’s followed by a Sunday night date with the Patriots that is in the flex window, but it falls on a Thanksgiving weekend where the Sunday slate has been further diluted by a fifth game in the days surrounding Thanksgiving. That Fox can’t rely on the division rivalry rule to keep Seahawks-Niners helps, but it still only leaves games involving teams that are 3-4 at best as options, one of which would put a team on SNF in consecutive weeks.

Yet the Chargers are so dire that, depending on how the Texans do, that might end up being the window most likely to see a flex this year. The Chargers have one more flexible window, but it’s on Thursday night, the window most difficult to flex out of, against the Niners in a potentially even more lopsided contest than the Eagles game. There are multiple potentially strong candidates out of the TNF-eligible games, though both of the other two flexible primetime games are likely not to have flexes considered, so there’s nothing stopping CBS and Fox from protecting them. But it probably doesn’t matter either way, because CBS’ lead late doubleheader game that week is Cowboys-Rams, and both that game and Niners-Chargers are being held at SoFi Stadium, making a flex out of the latter literally impossible. (Did I mention that this is the week directly before Texans-Eagles?)

I get that you can’t always arrange things so that you avoid weeks where both teams in the same city are at home, forcing one of them into a non-Sunday game, and I get that when you’re putting together the schedule you don’t anticipate the need for a flex, but this still feels like an unforced error on the league’s schedule-makers – made all the worse by the fact that CBS has a Saturday night game that week that could have easily been made Cowboys-Rams, putting Bears-Bills into the Sunday afternoon window. (Admittedly, I don’t know if CBS has ever had an all-NFC game in a standalone window outside Thanksgiving and the playoffs since the advent of crossflexing.) But a lot of other problems the league is running into this season feel like they’re of their own making. Eagles-Quinns falls into the week where the league put Ravens-Bills into CBS’ early doubleheader window, and may have tried to arrange things so it would be as insulated from a potential flex as possible, but gave NBC a game that, while an NFC East matchup between big markets and large fanbases, involves a Washington team that was expected to be mediocre, not a great consolation prize for missing out on CBS’ blockbuster doubleheader. Before this past week’s games, Bucs-Bears the following week was subject to considerable speculation over being the subject of a flex of its own, but back in May that was just one piece of what was seen as a shockingly weak first-half slate for NBC, to the point some wondered if the league was belatedly punishing them for overpaying for the NBA and putting that league’s national media revenues uncomfortably close to those of the NFL. Then there’s the decision to create a bunch of new standalone windows in the first place, stretching the schedule so thin that the league almost has no choice but to put mediocre games in some of them.

Part of the problem here may be a matter of mismatched expectations – I wondered last year what flexible scheduling really means for Monday and Thursday Night Football, given the difficulty of flexing games into those windows – but the NFL is in large part responsible for setting those expectations by trumpeting how great flex scheduling is while not publicizing the ways CBS and Fox can protect games from being flexed, to the point of still using “play your way into primetime” when history has shown just how difficult it is to actually do that, especially if you’re not the biggest name team. The Browns are leading the AFC North at 3-2 after getting a single TNF appearance as their sole primetime game, but were at the mercy of CBS to be flexed in for Eagles-Quinns because their opponent in that game was the same one as in their TNF game, and even though both weeks I’ve identified as seeing potential flexes have Browns games that are likely to be unprotected, I’m skeptical that either of them would actually be flexed in (and the one I would be more optimistic about may effectively fall under the division rivalry rule).

But the way the Week 8 schedule played out perhaps most illustrates how people’s expectations don’t align not only with the reality of the flex schedule rules, but of how the league schedules to begin with. If the league really acted like having a good record was enough to “play your way into primetime” and wanted to maximize the quality of the games in all these standalone windows they’ve created, they’d never have a Tier 1 game outside a featured window at all, let alone one that actually does involve star players and teams that would only be scheduled for the early doubleheader on purpose. The league presents flex scheduling as though CBS and Fox are just a stopgap, a dumping ground for games deemed not ready for primetime, even though they wouldn’t be paying nearly as much to the league as they are if that was the case. But when they give CBS and Fox games that are too good that can’t be shown to as wide an audience as possible, they end up paying for it when there happens to be a bad primetime game in that week and they can’t flex out of it. Mike North is the league’s point man for both the schedule release and for in-season flex scheduling, so you’d think he’d recognize that this demonstrates why you don’t put too many CBS/Fox halves of divisional rivalries on other networks in the same flexible week, yet color me skeptical that the league will change its scheduling philosophy going forward.

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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven 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 no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
  • 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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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The twentieth season (woo!) of the Flex Schedule Watch got off to a slightly early start on Monday with a Last-Minute Remarks post on the prospect of a Week 8 early flex. There, I mentioned that the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe had reported on the possibility that Eagles-Quinns could be flexed out, but I was skeptical about it actually happening given the constraints involved until the news broke about Jalen Hurts’ blood clot. Tucked in his report, though, was an intriguing possible tidbit about the flex schedule process:

Now, as I say in the tweet, I’d given up on figuring out any timeframe for protections being due under the current contract other than “at the same time the league has to make a decision”, so this being stated so matter-of-factly made me raise an eyebrow, but Tornoe interviewed the league’s schedule-maker Mike North about Eagles-adjacent flexing situations late in the first two seasons of the new contract, so he’s high on the list of people who would know what they were talking about. That said, this being applicable to the situation Tornoe was writing about would be surprising, as my impression was that regardless of anything else, when it came to early flexes CBS and Fox were able to make protections at decision time even when early flexes were introduced under the previous contract.

Still, is the evidence consistent with a three-week deadline to submit protections? Let’s look back on what clues we’ve gotten over the first three seasons of the current contract and see where things lead:

  • 2023 offseason: Mike North implies, and Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill confirms, that the universal Week 5 deadline for protections is no longer in effect under the new contract, with Mulvihill stating “without revealing too much it’s now significantly closer to each game date“. Meanwhile, the league institutes Thursday night flex scheduling; the original proposal would have given teams 28 days’ notice that a game could be flexed to Thursday night, with the actual decision coming with 15 days’ notice. The league ultimately decides to impose a 28-day deadline to make a decision overall. As such, my initial tentative conclusion is that protections need to come down four or five weeks in advance.
  • Week 10-11, 2023: On Tuesday, 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco tweets that Fox “plans to protect” Niners-Eagles for Week 13. This makes me conclude that “the deadline for protections is no more than three weeks in advance, and more likely runs right up to the point where the league needs to make a decision”, depending on whether the “plans to protect” phrasing is meant to imply that Fox could be making that protection right after or even before the tweet, or that it merely plans to make the protection after the following week’s games. In any case, at the time I still don’t know how this interacts with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes or the 6-day deadline for late-season SNF flexes.
  • Week 13, 2023: On Thursday the league announces Week 15 flexes, which is odd to me because it would otherwise seem to me that if the league wasn’t going to wait for the Week 13 results, they might as well have announced the changes as early as Tuesday. Then on Monday Andrew Marchand, then of the New York Post, reveals the horse-trading that went into those flexes, including that Fox didn’t need to protect Cowboys-Bills because they were guaranteed eight Cowboys games, and the league allowed them to take Bears-Browns from the Saturday pool to convince them to release their protection on (notably, not to refrain from protecting) Eagles-Seahawks. To date, this is the only known time that conference-network appearance minimums have come into play when it comes to flexing, and the Chiefs being scheduled for only seven CBS games the following year, and CBS still needing to protect one of those games, suggests that the way that rule works, or is used by the networks, is difficult to predict. For our purposes, it suggests a fairly short window for when the protection deadline might be: namely, the Wednesday or Thursday heading into the last week before a 14-day decision, basically 17 or 18 days out. (In the above-linked post I also deal with why CBS and Fox submitting protections whenever the league tells them they’re considering a flex, as was suggested to me at the time, both isn’t helpful to me and isn’t completely consistent with the league’s statements.) Two weeks later the league again confirms a schedule, this time without any changes, on the Thursday of the game week two weeks before the one in question, despite the week in question being a six-day flex window for intra-Sunday changes, and it happens again for Week 14 of 2025.
  • Week 11, 2024: Broncos beat writer Chris Tomasson says, in a tweet posted right before the start of the Thursday night game, that CBS is “expected to freeze” Eagles-Ravens on the Week 13 slate. That implies that CBS hasn’t yet submitted a protection as the Week 11 slate begins, but said expected protection is prefaced with “as previously noted” so it’s possible Tomasson is repeating something he’d previously reported and not gotten an update on. As far as I’m aware, this is the main piece of evidence against a three-week deadline for protections.
  • Week 12, 2024: Our first and so far only Thursday night flex is instituted when Broncos-Chargers replaces Browns-Bengals on the Week 16 slate, which I bring up here because it’s said that the flex was officially made minutes before the deadline, midnight on Thursday night/Friday morning. Under current rules, then, after the Thursday flex deadline was changed to 21 days in advance in the 2025 offseason, the deadline for a Week 16 Thursday flex would be right after the Week 13 Thursday night game, so the Thursday flex deadline is still a week before what the protection deadline would be.

All told, I don’t really see any reason not to take Tornoe’s statement as my assumption going forward, though I do note that the evidence in support of it is all from the first year of the current contract and the one piece of firm evidence since then, while flimsy, works against it. But I’m still going to work under the assumption that the deadline is still “when the decision has to be made” for early flexes, which is going to come into play right away.

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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven 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 no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
  • 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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 8 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Week 8 (SNF early flex ): Earlier this week the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe reported that the NFL was considering flexing out Eagles-Quinns from the Week 8 Sunday Night Football slot. While I briefly considered starting the full-size Flex Schedule Watch a week earlier than planned to accommodate this, ultimately I was content to let this serve as the extent of my analysis:

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How Might the Integration of CBS Sports and TNT Sports Play Out?

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Well sports fans, you got your wish. Are you happy now?

Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, when the cable bundle still seemed to rule the world of entertainment, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of CBS and the outfit then known as Turner Sports teaming up to retain the former’s rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, a number of sports-focused media watchers wondered about the possibility of CBS and Turner’s then-owner, Time Warner, merging. From a sports perspective, it seemed to make sense: while Disney, Comcast, and Fox all had both broadcast and cable outlets to air sports, CBS had a broadcast network but its only suitable cable outlet was the poorly-distributed CBS Sports Network, while Turner had perhaps the best non-ESPN collection of sports rights on cable, but no broadcast network. I felt this was a simplistic, myopic analysis that didn’t take into account the whole picture of how well the two companies might fit together – most obviously, Time Warner-owned HBO and CBS-owned Showtime were the top two names in premium television networks, plus you’d have the separate news operations of CBS and CNN – and that became even more so when CBS re-merged with Viacom and picked up a real base of cable networks again, including Nickelodeon which has a long-standing competition with Warner-owned Cartoon Network, as well as reuniting with the Paramount movie studio, one of several major studios alongside Warner Bros. I actually thought Fox’s brief dalliance with buying Time Warner made more sense, even from a sports perspective.

Well, last week, the merger of the two companies closed, with the merged company having no trace of either company in its name, operating under the Skydance name inherited from the media company David Ellison originally picked up before buying first Paramount and now Warner Bros. Discovery. In most corners of the Internet, the reaction has generally been a sense of dread, partly over the prospect of lost jobs and draconian cost-cutting to pay down the massive debt the Ellison family has racked up in these transactions (not to mention the debt inherited from WBD), but also what some fear is the real purpose of the transaction: turning CNN into right-wing propaganda, once Bari Weiss, the person Ellison installed as head of CBS News who promptly pushed the division into being more conservative-friendly and less critical of Trump, gets her hands on it. Certainly Paramount Skydance was the only company interested in keeping WBD’s cable networks in the fold; WBD planned to split into separate companies for its studios and networks before Ellison began his hostile takeover attempt, and when WBD courted Netflix as an alternative, that transaction would have involved only the studios portion of the split. What might once have been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a CBS-Warner merger, negotiating the potential merger of CBS News and CNN and the potential regulatory hurdles presented by it, not only wasn’t a problem for the Trump FCC and DOJ, but the whole reason why it happened.

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The Pros and Cons of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Process Overhaul

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Two years after the introduction of the biggest change to its selection process since at least 2004, on Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced what may be the biggest change to its selection process ever.

Much like the 2024 changes, these changes have two main components to them. First, the main selection committee is being reduced in size from 50 members to 28, three of which will be designated nonvoting participants each year. This means it is no longer possible for there to be representatives for each of the 32 NFL teams, as was the case with the prior makeup of the selection committee; all 27 selectors (outside the representative of the Pro Football Writers of America) will be chosen at large.

The bigger change, though, at least from the perspective of fans, is the elimination of the Senior category. All players, regardless of how long they have been retired, will be considered in a single pool. 13 players will be named as finalists and be considered alongside one coach and one contributor, each chosen by subcommittees. (In one sense, this is something of a return to the status quo prior to the centennial class of 2020, when coaches moved through the same selection process as players.) The definition of a contributor is also expanding to encompass candidates’ “full football resume that may include playing, coaching and other contributions to the sport”; I don’t know if that effectively serves as a way to create a potential 14th player or coach slot, or if this is just a way of sanctioning something like Doug Williams’ inclusion in the 2025 contributor process (and also potentially making it easier for influential assistant coaches like Clark Shaughnessy to find a way in).

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Is the PGA Tour’s Overhaul Really as Big a Change as It’s Being Hyped Up To Be?

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On Tuesday the PGA Tour announced a “new competitive structure” beginning in 2028 involving “two distinct series of tournaments” that it billed as being linked by a structure of promotion and relegation: the Championship Series, consisting of about 23 tournaments with the ones managed by the Tour having 120-player fields and purses of at least $20 million, and the Challenger Series, consisting of about 20 tournaments with fields of about 144 players and purses of at least $4 million. This has been described as a “split” of the existing tour that will make it “look fundamentally different“, a “complete and total transformation“, and as “one of the most significant structural changes in modern golf history“.

But reading the Tour’s announcements, I was struck by two things. First, there was no mention of the Korn Ferry Tour, the Tour’s existing developmental, second-level tour, only the continued existence of the “Q-School” qualifying tournament that has long allowed golfers to qualify for the main tour and the KFT. Second, and more importantly, the Championship Series doesn’t seem to have that many fewer players than the main tour today. Which raises the question: is this really a “split”, or just a rebranding of the KFT?

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Assessing the 2026 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This is one of the most bizarre NFL schedules I can remember, certainly since I started sorting games into “tiers” before the schedule release. There are several reasons for this that I’ll get into as we go along, but perhaps the biggest is that, despite neither the Bengals nor Jaguars qualifying for Tier 1, no fewer than four games that could have ended up in Tier 1 did not end up in featured windows (admittedly with two of them involving the Chargers, which has two games falling into Tier 2) – the most eyebrow-raising of which must certainly be Ravens-Bills Week 8. The two quarterbacks that squared off for the 2024 MVP, who put on an overtime thriller on Sunday night last year, get a 1 PM ET game when I would have thought it would have been one of the most coveted games for the network partners to put in featured windows?

“You could put Baltimore-Buffalo in any of our primetime packages and any one of our partners would have been thrilled to get it, and you might’ve had 18 or 20 million people watching that game,” Mike North said on a Friday conference call. “As a 1 o’clock anchor for CBS, it may get 75% of the country. You might have more people watching that game Sunday on CBS at 1 o’clock than you might have if it was on Monday night or Thursday night. It reaffirms our commitment to keeping Sunday afternoon strong.”

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What the 2026 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Thursday, and as I’ve done the last two years, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, at least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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