Congratulations to Antonio Gates, Jared Allen, Eric Allen, and Sterling Sharpe on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2024 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.
Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame: Initial Ballot
As I wrote earlier, I’m working on a “shadow Hall of Fame” to settle the debate over how exclusive the Pro Football Hall of Fame is by sorting players into five tiers, adopting Bill Simmons’ “pyramid” model for Halls of Fame. You can help by voting on the initial ballot, which contains 500 players, 50 coaches, and 50 contributors, telling me which level you think each player should be inducted to or if they should be inducted at all.
The players listed on the ballot consist of:
- All current Hall of Famers
- All players to make at least the final 50 modern-era or senior candidate lists in the 2025 round of balloting, and have a Hall of Fame Monitor at Pro Football Reference over 40
- Any other players with a Monitor over 60
- Any players that started their career before 1955 and therefore don’t have a Monitor that made the list of preliminary senior candidates
- Any players that have been inducted as part of Not In Hall Of Fame‘s Hall of Fame Revisited project because of their contributions in the NFL
- Other players added at my discretion, with a broad goal of 375 players with Monitor scores and 125 without
This does not include a number of players that people have called for induction; you may add them in the Other category or leave a comment here or elsewhere vouching for them. The coaches and contributors consist of current Hall of Famers and people on the current ballots that I consider particularly deserving or likely to be inducted; these are subject to straight up/down votes, but you can also vote on if they should be sorted into tiers like the players.
The ballot is located HERE.
After the jump, if you need more help to decide what level to vote players to, I’ve adapted Simmons’ descriptions of each level in his proposed baseball and basketball Halls to the football context to serve as rules of thumb. Note that these have been only lightly edited from what Simmons wrote in each context and don’t necessarily translate to the football Hall, and I don’t necessarily agree that these are or should be criteria to separate the levels.
Introducing Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame
Less than a week after the Class of 2022 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Deion Sanders implicitly trashed it. In a video running just over a minute and 45 seconds, Sanders claimed that “the Hall of Fame ain’t the Hall of Fame no more”, that it had become a “free for all” where players that were merely good could be inducted, that the Hall should be for “people who changed the game” and not those who just had “three or four good years”.
Sanders didn’t name any names of any specific players that he felt didn’t belong in Canton, but a fellow Hall of Famer did call out a specific member of the 2022 class as undeserving and even problematic. Two months earlier, Bruce Smith, the NFL’s all-time sack leader, questioned the reasoning behind the induction of Tony Boselli as part of the 2022 class, specifically that people were citing Boselli’s performance against Smith in a 1996 playoff game. Using players’ performances against other Hall of Famers as criteria for induction, in Smith’s view, would erode the “exclusive fraternity” of Hall of Famers by incentivizing players to play up their performance against other Hall of Famers, creating “friction and discord”. Smith also noted that Boselli’s accomplishments weren’t quite comparable to other left tackles since the quarterback he was protecting, Mark Brunell, was left-handed, meaning Boselli wasn’t protecting his blind side.
Boselli had a relatively brief seven-year career, but was highly acclaimed with five Pro Bowl selections and was named first-team All-Pro three times as well as being selected to the All-Decade Team of the 1990s. It would certainly seem that the people who watched him play felt he could have protected the blind side of a right-handed quarterback at a level comparable to the best to do so, and the 1996 playoff game is just a single piece of evidence in favor of that. His Hall of Fame Monitor score at Pro Football Reference is 80.68, behind only two tackles not in Canton: Jim Tyrer and the only-recently-retired Jason Peters.
A more questionable 2022 inductee, if you wanted to do so, would be Sam Mills, who was named first-team All-Pro by the AP only once (though he was named to the first team by other selectors on two other occasions) in an 11-year career that got him named to the Pro Bowl five times (tied for the fewest of any post-merger linebacker in Canton), resulting in a Monitor score of only 55.78. Dave Wilcox is the only linebacker with a lower score in Canton, and among inside linebackers Mills has the lowest score by over seven points. Also worth noting is that year’s senior inductee, Cliff Branch, whose 8685 receiving yards is the second-fewest of any wide receiver in Canton who played his entire career after the merger (not counting Devin Hester), and Drew Pearson, unlike Branch, was named to an All-Decade team.
Cantonmetrics: 2025 Finalists
Each year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame names at least 15 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the semifinalists named in November, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as finalists for induction to the Hall of Fame. Before Super Bowl LIX, the panel will meet virtually and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to seven, from which at least three and no more than five will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The committee will also consider three senior candidates, a coach, and a contributor, each selected by their own individual committees earlier in December, from which at least one and no more than three will be selected for induction. Unless they have only a handful of years of eligibility left, modern-era players that are named finalists are almost always inducted eventually, so this provides a glimpse at what players can look forward to eventual induction.
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16
Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Christmas day games.
Here’s something I could have put in this section last week but didn’t: last week Mike Tirico appeared on Jimmy Traina’s podcast and suggested the league adopt a Premier League-style scheduling model for the last month or so of the season, where games are complete free agents only assigned to windows and networks when the time comes to make flex decisions on each one. Tirico thinks “it would really benefit everybody to just kind of put placeholders in”, but realistically I don’t think the networks would stand for that depending on where they are in the pecking order for choosing games. (I’d think what he really meant was that it would benefit his employer specifically, except that of the three featured windows on Sunday and Monday last week, NBC was probably most satisfied with what they got.) The doubleheader network would still get priority for their late afternoon game, but all the other half-decent games would be siphoned away to other networks. Networks care about their 1 PM ET windows too, and at the very least the singleheader network needs a good game of some kind; this approach would basically amount to abolishing protections, and maybe even the division rivalry rule, in the last month of the season.
The league pretended this was how it worked in the first year of flex scheduling in 2006, listing all Sunday games at 1 PM, 4:05 PM, or 4:25 PM ET based solely on what time zone the game was being played in and (for West Coast games) whether the network it would be on under the old rigid road-team-based rules had the singleheader or doubleheader, implying the best of the unprotected games would go to NBC. In reality, NBC always had a tentative game penciled in, and in 2007 and subsequent years this tentative game was marked in the schedule from the start. All the networks want some idea of what games they’re going to get, if only to promote them for advertisers.
I don’t think the situation we had last week would have gone much better if this “free agent” system was in place but the Saturday games were still fixed, Fox was still guaranteed Eagles-Swing States, and they could still protect Vikings-Seahawks. If Broncos-Chargers still got flexed to TNF in mid-November, the three best games available two weeks out would have actually been the three games that were already in the featured windows. Now, you could argue that’s a sign of the league’s hubris in taking the Netflix deal and adding two more featured windows to the four it already had, but it still points to how the protection and division-rivalry rules are the real obstacles here to creating a decent, balanced schedule, and how if the league can’t solve that problem, the only solution is to take more care in constructing the schedule in May.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
- Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
- Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
- Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
- CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
- Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
- No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
- Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
- In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
- Click here to learn how to read the charts.
An even less belated blog-day.
A year ago at this time, I expressed optimism that this would be the year that this long period where I’ve felt like I’ve completely wasted my life would come to an end. That… has not happened.
I had grand plans for what to do with Da Blog in 2024, ranging from completing series that I hadn’t finished to starting new ones. I even had an idea to start a podcast, representing the biggest evolution of my “brand” since I wrote my book in 2015. Before, during, and after the election, I wanted to make posts exploring what went wrong in American and global politics for things to get to the point where a Donald Trump could get within a thousand miles of the White House once, let alone three times, let alone win the popular vote – including some posts I’ve been sitting on since his first campaign in 2016, if not longer. It would close the loop on the core issue that’s been the monkey on my back for the past eight years.
Instead, this is only the 31st post since my last blog-day post, the lowest total in three years but still a step ahead of the nadir of my productivity. The podcast involved way more work than I was comfortable with putting in, but the politics posts were a real disappointment for me. At least in 2016, even though I didn’t write many posts before the election, I got in a decent number of posts after it, including ones that went pretty far in-depth, despite also juggling the Flex Schedule Watch. This year, my last politics-related post was published the day before the election. I even tried to come up with a new strategy to commit to doing a certain amount of writing every day, but that fell apart remarkably quickly. I don’t know how much of it is my sleep schedule still being out of whack, certain other activities falling at awkward times, continuing to hold myself to too high a standard for how alert I need to be to write at the standard I’d like, having too many frivolous activities on my plate, if I’m just not in the right place to put the sort of energy into writing posts that would be necessary to maintain the pace I want to, or if there’s something psychologically wrong with me on a deep level, or even just that I’ve grown too old, even at only 36, to maintain the posting levels of Da Blog’s halcyon days. What I do know is that I think I absolutely need therapy, or some sort of professional help, if I’m ever going to get back to the level of productivity I want.
Year Eighteen of Da Blog marked a decade since I moved to Los Angeles with my dad, meaning more than half the time since Da Blog launched has been in LA – a move that was supposed to allow me to focus on Da Blog full-time, but has only really been productive for the first year and a half while I was writing the book, and even that wasn’t up to the level I’d like. I do intend to get some political posts in between now and the inauguration, but if I haven’t done any work on them up to this point there’s little realistic reason to think another month will be much of an improvement, aside from the Flex Schedule Watch ending for the season (I hope to get the Week 16 post up in the next 24 hours). The one source of optimism, besides my renewed commitment to getting some sort of help to make me more productive, is that my thinking about politics ended up pushing me in the direction of a larger project I hinted at in this post, but that won’t necessarily result in a burst of new posts in the short term and I’m not sure how willing or able I am to put in the consistent work on it I’d like.
I’m feeling like I’m entering Year Nineteen with less false optimism about my ability to pull myself out of my almost decade-long funk on my own. Whether that’s a good thing, because it’ll lead me to get the help I need, or a bad thing, because it’ll lead me to succumb to despair and frustration at my inability to live up to my own image of myself, is something only time will tell. Either way, this stands to be a pivotal year for Da Blog and my life.
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 15
Note: This post (mostly) does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game.
I said on Twitter that I wanted to get this out on Thursday even if I completed the percentage chances for the Sunday night games before then because I wanted to see if I could calculate percentage chances for the Saturday games, and I managed to get the Sunday games done on Tuesday morning, but then I dilly-dallied on actually writing the post until Friday morning, doing no work on the Saturday games in the meantime. Oops. Not a good sign for my ability to work on other posts I told myself I was going to work on after the election. If the Sunday situation was as convoluted as it’s been in some other recent years this might be another situation where I don’t get the post in at all; luckily there are very few games in the running for Sunday night in Week 18 and a couple of clear favorites (and even calculating the strength of victory situation for the Seahawks, while tedious, was relatively straightforward). It’s the flex decisions that were already made this week where the action is.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
- Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
- Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
- Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
- CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
- Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
- No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
- Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
- In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
- Click here to learn how to read the charts.
Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Flexible Scheduling Decisions Following Week 15
Week 16: No announcement was made on the Week 16 slate on Sunday, which is a change from past “six-day hold” situations. This sort of limbo can end up getting the 506sports Discord stir-crazy and wondering if Fox held the line enough on keeping Vikings-Seahawks to force CBS to stick with Niners-Dolphins as its lead game, but the most likely explanations are a) continued horse-trading involving what sort of compensation to give Fox and b) holding off so the league can make announcements for Weeks 16 and 17 at once. We saw with the Thursday night flex that the league can make a decision regarding a flex before they actually announce it. It’s worth noting that NBC advertised the Bucs-Cowboys game for Sunday night during last night’s game, after CBS and Fox did not advertise their slates for next Sunday at all – and it’s also worth noting that on-screen, though not verbal, advertisements for Bucs-Cowboys started showing up at halftime but were absent from NBC’s ticker during pregame, which may suggest NBC was informed that they would be keeping the game sometime during the first half. To my knowledge, however, as I write this nothing has leaked regarding any time or network changes.
Right now the playoff hopes of both the Niners and Dolphins are hanging by a thread, although the Chargers’ loss means that both a Chargers win and Dolphins loss would be needed to eliminate the Dolphins. If I were the czar of the NFL schedule I’d move Niners-Dolphins to the 1 PM ET window so the Rams can’t eliminate the Niners before game time; moving Rams-Jets late only dilutes the distribution of Niners-Dolphins, as it likely can’t move to the same network as Giants-Falcons. But moving any game other than Niners-Dolphins or Eagles-Swing States to 4:05 means moving a game involving a team already eliminated from the playoffs, and the next-best game on the Sunday afternoon slate, Lions-Bears, sees the Bears enforcing a blackout on CBS in the Chicago market, so moving it late means depriving the #3 market from the feature game. Jaguars-Raiders, the only other 4:25 PM ET game, might be the worst game of the entire season, let alone the week’s slate, so it’s not a good choice to move to Fox either. Given that, and given the time constraints if the schedule hasn’t already been finalized without our knowledge, a straight swap of Niners-Dolphins for Vikings-Seahawks seems most likely. (Hey, maybe in light of the Geno Smith injury, there’s a last-minute push to get Fox to give up Eagles-Swing States instead! Eh, probably not.) Final prediction: Minnesota Vikings @ Seattle Seahawks to 4:25 CBS.
Week 17 thoughts after the jump!
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 14
Twice under the old flex scheduling regime, the NFL and its partners agreed to hold off on deciding the Sunday night game for the penultimate week of the season until the week before, later than the 12-day window they were technically allowed to make changes in. Both cases involved extraordinary circumstances and saw decisions made in the middle of the day on Sunday that were, in my view, less than ideal. With the new contracts, NBC got an explicitly-spelled-out six-day window for flexes in the last month-plus of the season. Based on how this provision was described in the press releases on the new contracts and continues to be described in the league’s flex scheduling primer and my own rules spiel below, you might think this tightening of the window to make flexing decisions is a matter of course, that flexing decisions in December that only involve Sunday games will regularly be made a week in advance, albeit probably before the end of the preceding Sunday night game. But there’s a reason flex scheduling didn’t originally incorporate six-day windows outside the final week of the regular season, even though college football, which NFL flex scheduling was modeled on, had always had “six-day holds” even before the initial contracts for Sunday night flex scheduling were signed in 2005.
On Tuesday CBS sent a message to its affiliates stating that “the NFL will likely wait to announce the Week 16 schedule on a 6-day basis” and that CBS would inform affiliates of what games they’d get once the schedule was finalized, with knock-on effects on other related procedures such as station requests to change games. It’s a reminder that making schedule changes on such short notice is not a trivial matter. Normally JP Kirby, the proprietor of the 506sports website, posts preliminary versions of his maps showing what game each part of the country is getting on the corresponding Discord on the preceding Sunday night, but the stations themselves may not know what games they’re getting at that point, or even what games each network has on their slate. That’s not even getting into the logistical issues of rescheduling the work shifts of stadium grounds crew, security personnel, and other people whose work revolves around when each game is played, or the changes in plans that fans might have to make. As tempting as it can sometimes be to see the NFL as a TV show where games can be moved around freely, 12-day flex scheduling can be exasperating enough for fans trying to attend in person as it is without cutting the advance notice in half.
The attitude on the 506sports Discord leading up to CBS’ notice was that six-day flex windows would be used sparingly and as a last resort, with people anticipating the league making a final decision on the schedule before the end of the business day until the CBS notice confirmed that there would be no final decision until next week. I don’t think the league is going to be quite so reluctant to perform six-day flexes as they were when they weren’t actually part of the rules – for one thing, this situation seems straightforward enough that they could pull the flex right now if they wanted to – but there will be circumstances where I’ll make a Sunday flex prediction two weeks in advance even if the league still technically has another week.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
- Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
- Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
- Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
- CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
- Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
- No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
- Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
- In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
- Click here to learn how to read the charts.
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 13
As he did last year, NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning Mike North spoke with Rob Tornoe of the Philadelphia Inquirer about Eagles-adjacent flex scheduling situations. So you don’t have to use up any limited free article views on the Inquirer website before running into a paywall, here are the key takeaways.
First, North confirmed that the league is considering a Packers-Vikings for Eagles-Cowboys swap in Week 17. In Tornoe’s words, North said “there’s a ‘reasonable’ chance a move could happen if Eagles-Cowboys ‘doesn’t still warrant 100% of the country watching the game'”, but “maybe Dallas is on a five-game winning streak, and we keep that game right where it is”. Apparently the league has until Christmas Eve to make a decision, which is actually shorter than I thought – the Tuesday before the games would be played. The previous times the league pulled a “six-day hold” out of its ass for Sunday nights (before it became an official part of the league’s contracts), the announcement came on Sunday.
What may be more notable is the prospect of the league flexing out Bucs-Cowboys in Week 16, and if that doesn’t sound Eagles-adjacent, North begs to differ. He acknowledges that Fox has the right to keep Eagles-Swing States, but that the league could strike a deal with Fox if the situation warranted:
I’m not saying we’re going to do this, but in theory, you could make a case that if Fox were to lose the Philly-Washington game that day, get back the Tampa-Dallas game, still have a Detroit-Chicago game in the early window and Minnesota-Seattle in the late window, Arizona playing for something, Atlanta playing for something, it’s hard to say Fox’s Sunday afternoon would be ruined. Our partners are nothing if not amenable to a conversation.
North also said that “I would not be stunned if Tampa-Dallas stays on Sunday night”, but my view remains going beyond “not being stunned” to expecting it to stay put after the Cowboys’ current winning streak seemingly put to bed the notion that the Cowboys were just going to tank the rest of the season. I still don’t quite think I have a handle on when things get bad enough for the league to flex out of a Cowboys game, but as long as the game has playoff implications at least for the Bucs I would expect it to keep its spot. And while Fox would love to get a Cowboys game back, I also think Fox would much rather part with Vikings-Seahawks, whose distribution is necessarily limited by being in the late window, than Eagles-Swing States.
That said, I’m not willing to rule out a scenario where Fox parts with both Eagles-Swing States and Vikings-Seahawks – I just don’t think it involves Bucs-Cowboys being flexed out, and with Fox having already parted with Broncos-Chargers it would be tough to convince them of it. Read on.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
- Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
- Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
- Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
- CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
- Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
- No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
- Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
- In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
- Click here to learn how to read the charts.