Sports – Sports

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Number of Primetime Appearances Per Team for the 2021 Season and Protection Predictions

October 17, 2021 by Morgan Wick

So yeah, I’m running very late with this post, taking it down to the very last minute (literally, I’m starting writing it just five hours before the bulk of the Week 6 slate starts, and I haven’t even updated the Flex Scheduling Primer), I don’t really have a good reason for it, and I’m not particularly happy about it. The main reason I kept putting it off was wanting to talk about the impact of the NFL’s new TV agreements and 17-game schedule on flex scheduling, even though what we know raises more questions than answers. So as I present this to you about 40 minutes into the Week 6 early slate I’m going to talk about those developments, and list each team’s count of primetime appearances, and bring you at least a rudimentary form of the Week 5 post I should have given you earlier in the week.

UGGHH.

September 30, 2021 by Morgan Wick

I hate having to do a gap-filler post for September. I need to do a season-opening post for the Flex Schedule Watch (people are already starting to leave comments on my last post from last year), and probably would have if not for a perfect storm of circumstances. In the early part of the month I was still thinking I was going to do a post about recent developments in college sports, and then a couple weeks ago I suffered a serious injury I’ve spent most of the intervening time recovering from and in no shape to do any sort of serious thinking.

I might still have gotten something in this week, but I have a lot of work to put into it, more so than normal. I want to say something about the impact of the NFL’s new TV deals on flex scheduling (about which we know frustratingly little), and I have to update the Flex Scheduling Primer for not only that and last year’s developments, but some of the more immediate flex scheduling impacts from the 17-game schedule and ESPN getting a pair of Week 18 games. That’s made it seem like a more daunting task for me to get into than it normally is, and it’s had to compete for my time and attention with various other things, including the fast-approaching NHL season and concurrent debut of new TV partners for that league, which has been an especially big time sink given my newfound emphasis on graphics packages, and mock-ups of same, on Twitter.

None of that is to excuse my lack of posting this month and I absolutely should have gotten that Flex Schedule Watch kick-off post in, and I definitely will get it in in the next week, if only because the protection cut-off point is fast approaching. After that we’ll progress week to week as normal, and I have some ideas for what to do after that (including the return of something long dormant), but whether or not next year is any more productive than the past few years have been is anyone’s guess. (But I sure as heck don’t want to still be living with my dad a year from now, if only because I don’t want to be party to acknowledging the most blatantly corrupt and all-around terrible World Cup host selection ever.)

What Does the WarnerMedia-Discovery Merger Mean for Sports (At Least Stateside)?

May 31, 2021 by Morgan Wick

Earlier this month AT&T announced it was ending its involvement in the media business after only three years from the closure of its merger with Time Warner. The assets now known as WarnerMedia would be merged with Discovery to form a new entity with no AT&T ownership and with Discovery head David Zaslav in charge of the merged company, which might sound an awful lot like Discovery buying WarnerMedia (and AT&T would get plenty of compensation in the form of cash and absorption of debt obligations, albeit amounting to pennies on the dollar from the original Time Warner acquisition), except AT&T shareholders would own nearly three-quarters of the new company. WarnerMedia’s diverse portfolio of adult and children’s entertainment networks, plus news networks and sports content, premium cable, and the HBO Max service launched under AT&T, would now be joining forces with Discovery’s documentary, reality, and other nonfiction programming.

A number of analysts in the aftermath suggested this would be a “game changer” for sports with “one more bidder entering the market” for sports rights, with one analyst claiming it would have “profound implications” as the new company could create a “must-have sports streaming service”, but considering that WarnerMedia already had high-profile sports rights and Discovery didn’t have any US sports rights whatsoever, nor does either company have a broadcast network presence, it’s hard to see how the new company is any more of a factor in sports rights negotiations than WarnerMedia already was. To be sure, before this year it had been a long time since Turner had been much of a factor in trying to acquire rights they didn’t already own and that were in any way competitive, the main exception being a run with the UEFA Champions League that only ended up lasting a year and a half and didn’t particularly impress soccer fans.

Then sports media watchers were blindsided when Turner came seemingly out of nowhere to take the half of the NHL package Disney hadn’t locked up, effectively saving the league from having to take significantly less money than they were hoping for after NBC was lukewarm at best to continuing their involvement, Fox set a ceiling on how much they would pay, and CBS wasn’t interested at all. The rights could be said to have fallen into Turner’s lap, but it’s still impressive that Turner was able to pay pretty close to what the NHL was looking for and beat out all other comers (including the possibility that Disney might have simply taken the whole package), and as incredible as it was that ESPN, the outfit more responsible than any other for keeping two Stanley Cup Final games on cable over the past two decades, would be the outfit to finally put every Final game on broadcast, it was even more incredible to find out that the other three Finals over the course of the deal would air entirely on cable, after the great care NBC took in the latter portion of their relationship to ensure NBCSN wouldn’t air a Game 4 where the Cup could be awarded. Zaslav’s comments that he’d been working on the merger for months before word got out (and had been badgering AT&T about a deal pretty much from the instant the Time Warner merger was completed) could serve as fuel for speculation that he was the driving force behind the NHL deal all along, and suggests that if the only impact a WarnerMedia-Discovery merger has on the former company’s sports operation is an infusion of resources (even though the merged company is probably smaller than AT&T as a whole during the WarnerMedia era), that’s still going to be enough to shake up the sports landscape.

But there aren’t a whole lot of high-value rights left. MLS rights, currently shared by ESPN and Fox, expire in 2022, but the value of those rights are a shadow of even the NHL. The NBA is the only one of the traditional four major sports that hasn’t locked up new rights deals in the past few months and Turner will be playing defense there when those rights come up by 2025. The NFL hasn’t settled the future of NFL Sunday Ticket, and SportsBusiness Daily’s John Ourand thinks DiscoverWarnerMedia might become a player there, but it feels like an odd fit without holding any exclusive or linear rights.

With ESPN picking up CBS’ SEC contract, there aren’t any major college conference rights up for renewal before 2024, when the Big Ten and Pac-12’s deals expire, with the Big 12 and Big East following suit the following year; the NCAA’s deal with ESPN for less-prominent sports expires then as well, and those deals could be an opportunity for DiscoverWarnerMedia to deepen their relationship with college sports and the NCAA (whose web site they already run) and avoid simply parachuting in for March Madness. But both ESPN and especially Fox are likely to spend profusely to defend their Big Ten rights, and the Pac-12 right now is in a place where they’re in danger of becoming the clear fifth conference of the Power 5, while the Big 12 has the least valuable demographics of the Power 5 and the Big East has no football and hasn’t moved the needle for FS1 as much as they thought it would. The College Football Playoff, whose current deals run through the 2025 season, is likely to come up at this point as well, but I doubt they have much interest in continuing to be a cable-only enterprise given their popularity and the direction media is headed, and they certainly won’t go with an outfit without any other college football rights (covers ears and sings loudly to drown out people bringing up the BCS on Fox). That’s not even getting into the notion of a large-scale shakeup of college football that might come mid-decade (one that, depending on the players involved, could yet see DiscoverWarnerMedia benefit).

NASCAR comes up for renewal in 2024 as well, but Turner seemed like an odd relic last time they had those rights with a handful of early-summer races, both they and ESPN pretty much didn’t want anything to do with the sport anymore by the time that deal ended, and NASCAR ratings didn’t finish crashing through the floor until a few years into the Fox/NBC era. On the other hand, the shutdown of NBCSN means NBC could be vulnerable to a concerted effort from a determined rival, which, given their portion of the schedule coincides with football season, would mean either Turner or ESPN. Everything else that could move the needle, including the World Cup, SEC, and ACC, are all locked up for the rest of the decade, and anything else that is coming up in that time isn’t likely to move the needle very much.

What Discovery does bring to the table that might make an impact on WarnerMedia’s sports operations is their Eurosport network, and a lot of the excitement surrounding the merger concerns the possibility of blending the Turner networks’ sports rights with Eurosport’s to form an unbeatable sports streaming service. But Eurosport’s slate of rights is singularly unimpressive, at least from an American standpoint, which might be surprising given its prominence; in fact Turner’s rights slate might benefit Eurosport more than the other way around. (Also, the opportunities for synergy are limited given Eurosport broadcasts in each of Europe’s many languages.) What rights Eurosport does have that would be relevant to Americans – the Olympics and PGA Tour – are among the rights already locked up stateside into the next decade (and Turner’s efforts to pick up PGA Tour rights were simply embarrassing, talking about converting one of their networks into a duplicate of what NBC already had), and everything else is a hodgepodge of rights.

It has plenty of soccer, but not much of it applies throughout its territory (in fact very little applies outside Scandinavia and Romania) and what does apply tends to be decidedly lower-tier; they technically have domestic rights to the German Bundesliga (extending to much of Central and Eastern Europe) but resold those rights (as well as those in Austria and Switzerland) to DAZN (which led to DAZN launching German linear channels only reluctantly and while griping about how they shouldn’t be necessary, once again overlooking the true value of linear television). Both outlets would likely be interested in acquiring Premier League rights for as many territories as possible, but that seems to be NBC’s top priority now that Sky Sports, the outlet arguably responsible for the Premier League’s very existence, is a corporate sibling. Eurosport also has rights to the three Grand Tours of bicycle racing, and the Tour de France might be up for the taking with NBCSN shutting down, but it’s not like being on TNT or TBS is actually any different than being on USA.

What stands out to me, looking at Eurosport’s slate of rights from the perspective of the Turner networks, is tennis. Eurosport has pan-European rights to the French and US Opens (excluding rights to the US Open in the UK and Ireland, where Amazon holds rights), to the Australian Open in the vast majority if not all of Europe, and Wimbledon in a majority of countries they serve. They also hold rights to the ATP Tour in France, Russia, Scandinavia, Romania, and Hungary, and the WTA Tour in Denmark and Russia. In the United States, rights to most events outside the Grand Slams are held exclusively by Tennis Channel, which just locked up a deal to become the exclusive home of ATP Tour events, including the most prominent events in North America, for an indeterminate amount of time, though the similar deal with the WTA expires after 2023. Tennis Channel is also the main rightsholder at the French Open, with ESPN holding rights to the other three Grand Slams, though I haven’t seen anything indicating that they’ve reached an agreement with the Australian Open extending past 2021. Their deal with Wimbledon runs through 2023, while the US Open deal runs through 2025; Tennis Channel’s deal with the French Open runs through 2023, with NBC’s deal ending the following year. DiscoverWarnerMedia could be a surprisingly motivated bidder for rights to each of the four Grand Slams, at minimum, over the next four years. Anything else would likely require a relationship with Tennis Channel, and Sinclair Broadcast Group likely doesn’t see a reason to part with it (and certainly not to have the whole company being acquired if it means they don’t get to spread conservative propaganda on their broadcast stations anymore, and DiscoverWarnerMedia likely doesn’t have much stomach for running broadcast stations anyway). Still, this might be the biggest immediate impact of the merger.

There’s one more wrinkle to consider here, albeit one that’s only incidentally related to the merger itself. Though AT&T’s regional sports networks were acquired through the purchase of DirecTV, after the Time Warner merger they were placed in the same part of WarnerMedia as Turner Sports in the News and Sports division under Jeff Zucker, actually separate from the rest of the TBS and TNT networks in the Studios and Networks division. I haven’t seen any mention of the RSNs in any discussions of the deal, and there were rumors for a while that not all of the WB Games division would make the transition to the new company so it’s not a sure thing the RSNs will, but I would normally assume the RSNs will in fact make the transition. Certainly the RSNs were long subject to rumors that AT&T was hoping to unload them in some way, arguably predating the AT&T-DirecTV merger but shifting into overdrive as the RSN market seemingly collapsed, with the prospect of a reunion with their former Fox Sports Net bretheren at Sinclair being particularly floated. With the NHL deal, though, WarnerMedia now has national rights to each of the three sports that make up the backbone of most RSNs, and while ideally you’d want a larger group than just four RSNs (not counting the separate feeds for Utah and Nevada) for this, there’s an opportunity to create some form of synergy between the RSNs and the national outlets, if Zaslav wants it. At the very least, if the RSNs aren’t part of AT&T anymore they’ll probably need a change of name.

In short, there are a lot of obstacles to a combined Discovery-WarnerMedia being a bigger player in sports rights than either company alone, not the least of them being that there isn’t a single package of rights held by both Turner and Eurosport as it stands, other than Russia-specific rights to the NHL, which means there’s not a lot it can do at the moment to create a streaming service that would be fundamentally the same on both sides of the Atlantic. The ability to offer international rights in Europe would certainly help in WarnerMedia’s negotiations with sports leagues, but the entities that would be most interested in that are either locked up for the next decade, already with Turner, or have limited appeal, and Eurosport has shown little interest in the European leagues and competitions that would be interested in a stateside presence, so it seems doubtful the American sports consumer would notice much of a difference. Tennis is probably the only sport where joining forces with Eurosport would pay dividends for the Turner networks in the short term, but even there the impact is likely to be limited. So while this merger is likely to have a significant impact on rights to American sports leagues in Europe, could impact stateside rights to tennis and cycling, and gives both entities an infusion of cash and the ability to bid for trans-Atlantic rights to fuel the pursuit of more sports rights, hyperbolic claims about its impact on the sports landscape are probably unwarranted in the short term; if anything, a good chunk of the impact may have already happened. Still, it’ll be worth keeping a close eye on NBA rights negotiations in the next few years if the deal gets approved; to the extent DiscoverWarnerMedia can launch a trans-Atlantic streaming service, NBA rights will probably have to be the linchpin for it.

A Blast from the Past that will Shape the Future: What Does the NHL’s Return to ESPN Mean for the Future of Live Sports Video?

March 12, 2021March 12, 2021 by Morgan Wick

In 2007, after ESPN had screwed over Fox (who had reportedly been thinking of putting the entire Stanley Cup Final on broadcast television) in taking control of the entire NHL broadcast contract and proceeded to barely promote it at all (especially after taking over the NBA contract a few years later) and bump it to ESPN2 if just about anything and everything could be put on ESPN ahead of it, most infamously poker, then turned down a $60 million option to extend the contract in the wake of the lockout leaving the league to turn with their tail between their legs to the outfit then known as the Outdoor Life Network, then made NHL highlights virtually persona non grata on SportsCenter to the consternation of hockey fans who felt ESPN, then at the seeming height of their monopolistic power, was sticking it to any league or entity that didn’t bother to sign a contract with them… if you told hockey fans that ESPN would end up being the entity responsible for putting every game of the Stanley Cup Final on American broadcast television, would they have believed you in a million years?

But indeed, that’s what will happen in four out of the seven years, including (presumably) next year, of ESPN’s new agreement with the NHL announced Wednesday, a deal that will reportedly pay the NHL $400 million a year, close to twice what NBC was paying for only half the national television contract. Perhaps no other recent sports rights deal better captures the shifts in the video (it seems gauche to call it “TV”) business in recent years, and it’s hard to think of one that will have more of an impact (the reported move of Thursday Night Football to largely being exclusive to Amazon feels like more of a paradigm shift but hasn’t been announced yet and may have less relevance to defining the role of linear television going forward). In something that would have been unthinkable, certainly for ESPN, maybe five years ago, this appears to be a deal largely about ABC and ESPN+, with linear ESPN largely an afterthought.

Predictions for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2021

January 7, 2021 by Morgan Wick

The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selections are performed by a panel of 46 leading NFL media members including representatives of all 32 NFL teams, a representative of the Pro Football Writers of America, and 13 at-large writers.

The panel has selected a list of 15 finalists from the modern era, defined as playing all or part of their careers within the last 25 years. A player must have spent 5 years out of the league before they can be considered for induction into the Hall of Fame. Players that last played in the 2015 season will be eligible for induction in 2021.

On January 19, the panel will meet virtually and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to five. Those five will be considered alongside one senior candidate, one contributor, and one coach, each selected by nine-member subpanels of the larger panel last August, for a total of eight. From this list, at least four and no more than eight people will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

My prediction for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2021 is:

Peyton Manning
Charles Woodson
Tony Boselli
Alan Faneca
Richard Seymour
Drew Pearson
Bill Nunn
Tom Flores

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 15

December 21, 2020 by Morgan Wick

Since it started in its current format as the NFL’s main primetime package in 2006, the defining feature of NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been the use of flexible scheduling to ensure the best matchups and showcase the best teams as the season goes along. Well, that’s the theory, anyway; the reality has not always lived up to the initial hype and has at times seemed downright mystifying. Regardless, I’m here to help you figure out what you can and can’t expect to see on Sunday nights on NBC.

A full explanation of all the factors that go into flexible scheduling decisions can be found on my NFL Flexible Scheduling Primer, but here’s the Cliffs Notes version with all the important points you need to know:

The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 16; and week 17. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games, as well as late-season Saturday games, are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturday of Week 16 in recent years and Week 15 this year – see below).
During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
CBS and Fox may also each protect games in five out of six weeks of the main flex period, but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
In Week 17, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 was the first time it showed such a game. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 14

December 17, 2020 by Morgan Wick

The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 16; and week 17. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games, as well as late-season Saturday games, are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturday of Week 16 in recent years and Week 15 this year – see below).
During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
CBS and Fox may also each protect games in five out of six weeks of the main flex period, but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
In Week 17, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 was the first time it showed such a game. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Thoughts on @Ourand_SBJ’s Predictions for Sports Media in 2021

December 16, 2020 by Morgan Wick

As we approach the end of the year we see the arrival of the season for reflecting on the past and predicting the future, and in the sports media business there’s always something going on that make the business of predictions exciting; whenever big rights deals come up for renewal the possibilities seem endless for what might happen, and as the legacy television industry struggles to come to terms with the advent of cord-cutting moves taken now will have ramifications for decades to come. John Ourand’s annual prediction column in the Sports Business Journal is generally good for a mix of bold predictions, assessment of the current landscape, and surprisingly odd analysis for someone so well-connected. I’ve dedicated entire tweet threads to his column in the past, but I haven’t entirely abandoned the notion raised way back when I started my Tweeter that anything that took up multiple tweets would go in a blog post instead, so here’s my take on Ourand’s predictions for 2021:

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 13

December 10, 2020 by Morgan Wick

Note: This post does not take into account the result of the Thursday night game. Apologies, but the Tuesday night game pushed everything back and then I had to try and make sense of the news that blindsided me (but apparently not some of my commenters) the next day.

The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 16; and week 17. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games, as well as late-season Saturday games, are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturday of Week 16 in recent years and Week 15 this year – see below).
During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
CBS and Fox may also each protect games in five out of six weeks of the main flex period, but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
In Week 17, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 was the first time it showed such a game. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 12

December 2, 2020 by Morgan Wick

The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 16; and week 17. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games, as well as late-season Saturday games, are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturday of Week 16 in recent years and Week 15 this year – see below).
During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
CBS and Fox may also each protect games in five out of six weeks of the main flex period, but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
In Week 17, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 was the first time it showed such a game. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions: