NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

• Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
• Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
• Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
• CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Week 17: The result of the Monday night game puts CBS and the league in a precarious position. On the one hand, Jake Browning showed that he could be more than capable of leading the Bengals into the last quarter of the season, suggesting that Bengals-Chiefs might not warrant flexing out. On the other, the Jaguars’ loss, coupled with the ongoing uncertainty over Trevor Lawrence’s status, means that Dolphins-Ravens could well determine home field in the AFC, and may well turn out to be an AFC Championship Game preview with how the Chiefs have played below standard this year. The Packers’ win, and what it means for Jordan Love, suggests that if anything it may end up being the Vikings that drag the Sunday night game down. There’s no real reason to bail out of either the late-afternoon or Sunday night windows, but that would leave the best game of the day trapped as CBS’ lead early game – nowhere near as bad as the position Steelers-Seahawks finds itself in in the late singleheader (though Fox has managed to put together a pretty impressive-looking distribution pattern for Niners-Seahawks this week), but still pretty limited distribution for such a big game. There’s a very real possibility, in my mind, that the league elects to have Packers-Vikings and Dolphins-Ravens switch places and makes Packers-Vikings CBS’ new lead early game. Of course that would be going down a path that the league has legitimately rarely taken, let alone would go against Mike North’s “playoff implications uber alles” statements. A lot may depend on whether there’s a chance the Packers, Vikings, or Bengals could be eliminated by game time.

Week 18: Cowboys-Sheriffs, Bucs-Panthers, and Texans-Colts are all rematches of games currently scheduled for the wrong conference’s network. The main Sunday night NFC contenders remain Vikings-Lions (though at this rate their Week 16 clash might be must-win for the Vikings to make it relevant in the right way to justify a move) and the NFC South games, as the Bears aren’t yet close enough to the playoffs for Bears-Packers to be in play as more than a Saturday option and Rams-Niners would be a delicate situation given the gap between the teams and the very different stakes they’d be playing for. Those games do remain options for Saturday, but Cowboys-Sheriffs might be fading too fast as the Cowboys’ playoff position firms up and Washington’s hopes remain on life support. In the AFC the North games remain the strongest contenders with Steelers-Ravens having a chance to decide the division and Browns-Bengals potentially deciding a playoff spot, with Texans-Colts potentially also being a winner-take-all game and Bills-Dolphins and Broncos-Raiders standing as dark horses. (Did I seriously not change a single word of this from last week?)