Author and Thinker
Morgan Wick Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists
Congratulations to Julius Peppers, Andre Johnson, Dwight Freeney, Devin Hester, Patrick Willis, Randy Gradishar, and Steve McMichael 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 2023 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.
I don’t know if I’m going to do any more of these. I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I had the opportunity to do it, and I won’t rule out doing more audio stuff in the future (weird voice and all), but it took a lot out of me, chewed up most of my week, and I realized that if I were to spend more of it speaking off the cuff – even (perhaps especially) if I had a cohost – I’d probably leave a lot of dead air as I thought about what to say, which wouldn’t mesh well with the gimmick I came up with, and which would be a problem when writing a script takes almost as much effort for each topic as a full-fledged blog post would. (I mention I have a partially-written post on Pat McAfee sitting in my drafts, and I may end up publishing it largely adapted from what I say about him here.) It’s an interesting idea and I think you’ll find the result interesting as well, but I’m not sure this format is for me.
After the jump, timestamps and relevant links for each segment.
Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday or Saturday night games.
Perhaps predictably, over the past week social media has erupted with people moaning about why Dolphins-Ravens, the game likely to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, is trapped in the early singleheader, why it wasn’t moved to 4:25 or Sunday night. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in recent years, and CBS sure is trying its best to show it to as much of the country as possible, but it is notable that even leaving aside the jockeying between networks and the increased protections CBS and Fox get in the new contracts, this game could have easily been moved to the late afternoon and stayed on CBS. Instead, before any of last week’s games were even played CBS opted to stick with the Burrow-less disappointing Bengals against the Chiefs. Lo and behold, once the week’s results played out the Bengals’ win streak with Jake Browning at quarterback had come to an abrupt halt, leaving the Bengals hanging on to the possibility of a playoff spot by a thread, and the Chiefs had stumbled to the Raiders, keeping the silver and black’s own threadbare playoff hopes alive and nearly locking the Chiefs into the 3 seed, especially when coupled with Dolphins and Ravens wins against two of the best teams in the NFC.
It’s a reminder that as much as the NFL has a nationalized fanbase, the people who want to watch the best, most important games between the best teams, at least in the regular season, are still a distinct minority compared to those that just want to watch the teams they’re fans of or the most attractive, biggest-name teams. A Chiefs game this year always carries the possibility of a Taylor Swift bump, but even without the Swift factor the Chiefs are one of the three most attractive teams in the league right now, by far the most attractive in the AFC, the most dominant team in the league in recent years with some of its biggest stars. They’re not the Cowboys – if the Chiefs-Patriots game that got flexed out earlier this year for Eagles-Seahawks had been Cowboys-Patriots I think it keeps its spot – but they are one of those teams that can pop a rating by their mere presence. On the flip side, let’s not forget that the Dolphins produced one of the worst December Sunday Night Football ratings ever when they were flexed in down the stretch of last season – contributing to the league’s decision to plug Lions-Packers into Sunday night of Week 18 instead of a game that wouldn’t become meaningless for one team by the time it kicked off. Couple that with the Bengals and Chiefs still being very much in the playoff hunt, and that’s why my prediction last week was that if Dolphins-Ravens was going to be moved to a later time at all, it would be into Sunday night, not the late afternoon window.
That being said, while the games scheduled for featured windows before the season are determined as much by popularity as by how they’re expected to perform, the flexible scheduling regime is still governed by how good the teams are. The game originally scheduled for a primetime window will keep its spot unless there’s a compelling reason to move out of it, but if it is flexed out the game that replaces it will generally be determined by what game has the best pair of records, and there have been times when a passable game scheduled for Sunday night has nonetheless been flexed out in favor of a game that seemed to be too good to be as weakly distributed as it otherwise would have been. Mike North has repeatedly stated in recent seasons that the league wants to give every playoff team exposure in national windows before the playoffs so that audiences have some familiarity with the team before the playoffs hit – obscure, unpopular, yet good teams aren’t going to become more popular if they continue to languish in obscurity. So the NFL does try to put the best games in the best windows.
Well, Dolphins-Ravens ranked #4 on my list of Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t that I wrote before the season, where I even raised the prospect of it being flexed in for Packers-Vikings. In my tier structure based on preseason win totals at sportsbooks I introduced a few weeks ago, it was a Tier 2 game, meaning if the best games of the year were distributed evenly, it would be the second-best game of its week. Given the poor ratings for the Dolphins on SNF last year and the perception that the AFC North was still the Bengals’ to lose, I can’t completely fault the league for not putting the game in a featured window to begin with, but I can fault the league for scheduling it this late in the season but punting it to the early doubleheader while giving the Sunday night timeslot to a game involving a Packers team expected to finish below .500, New Year’s Eve or no. The league had to be aware that if things played out exactly as expected, CBS would have two games between big-time playoff contenders with win totals no lower than 9.5 while SNF would have a game involving a team on the fringes of the playoff picture at best, yet because CBS was scheduled for only eight Chiefs appearances the league wouldn’t be able to flex either one in. To be sure, the league and CBS couldn’t have figured that, while CBS would have the game between the AFC’s two best teams, it wouldn’t be the one they thought it’d be. Still, I feel like while the league and its TV partners can mess around with games involving popular teams for the first three months of the season, once December hits they need to stop messing around. If the flexible windows don’t contain what are expected to be the best games of their respective weeks, not counting games in featured inflexible windows, then the games that are the best need to be in a position where they can be flexed in, period. At the very least, if they’re serious about “playing your way into primetime” they need to minimize the risk of something like this happening.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
Offseason Snapshot | Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists | All-Snub Team
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 LVIII, the panel will meet virtually and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to five. Those five will be considered alongside three senior candidates and one coach or contributor, 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 nine people will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Unless they have only a handful of years of eligibility left, players that are named finalists are almost always inducted eventually, so this provides a glimpse at what players can look forward to eventual induction.
This is the 39th post since my last blog-day post, a slight improvement over a mark that I remarked at the time was the most I’d had since 2018, and in fact that mark was close enough to the 2018 mark that this is actually the most posts I’ve had since the start of my posting drought in 2016. So you might think this was a year for optimism about my ability to climb out of that drought, start posting more regularly again, and if not return to the halcyon days of the site, at least return to a place where I could put together some sizable projects that would give this site life outside football season.
It hasn’t felt that way, though, and the reality has been decidedly more mixed. I did get in a number of posts about the evolution of sports on television, and the linear television industry more generally, but they often came out well after the point where they were relevant. I put together a series of posts about a college football super league, but I’ve been sitting on the last part of the series and I’m not completely confident I’ll complete it in time for the national championship game. I said on the last blog-day post that I’d been sitting on a good old-fashioned long-form series for the past month or two, and I only managed to post one part of it all year and made virtually zero progress on the rest of it, and now I’m not confident I’ll ever return to it, especially since I’ve been sitting on two more long posts for months (though one of them is something like 95% complete and should be coming out before the new year). Last year I managed to sprinkle in some non-football posts amongst the Flex Schedule Watch; this year the Watch (and Cantonmetrics) completely took over the blog from October onwards, though a lot of that had to do with a) figuring out how the new rules would affect flex scheduling and b) the need to fill out the opening section of the new Flex Schedule Watch posts.
Basically, while I’ve improved my productivity some, I still haven’t been able to squeeze in enough time, and be awake and alert enough at those times, to write long-form posts at the rate I’d like. When I get going I can write most of a long-form post in a single session, but the prospect of it still seems daunting. I might be able to at least somewhat reduce the time I spend goofing off on my phone, but it’s possible that further increasing my level of productivity will require therapy, or perhaps a change in medication, and I’m not sure how able I’ll be to get either of those.
In the end, that might be the biggest cause for optimism to come out of Year Seventeen of Da Blog. It’s not that I started putting together long-form posts more often than I used to; it’s that I actually have something resembling a concrete path to improving things further. Coupled with my sleep schedule approaching something resembling normalcy and some other ideas I have for branching out into new areas, there’s a very real possibility that Year Eighteen marks the year where this wasted period of my life fully and completely comes to an end.
Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night or Saturday games (mostly).
So despite my use of a “cheat sheet” after what happened in 2021 this post came pretty close to going the same way. I’m inclined to blame it on the problems I ran into trying to fly to Seattle, but I still didn’t spend any time working on this on Friday. Maybe I should see if I can find a way to start working on this another week in advance? But the combinations involved multiply exponentially another week out.
One thing that occurred to me while I was working on the Week 17 section (before Thursday’s news) was that the eight-game minimum that applied to Cowboys games on Fox almost certainly doesn’t apply across the board. Only eleven out of 30 teams on my primetime appearance count list were scheduled to air on their respective conference’s network more than eight times, which would severely limit the league’s ability to pull the flex; notably, the Seahawks are among the teams scheduled for only eight Fox games, so flexing them in for Chiefs-Patriots would seem to have put them below the minimum. It had always been reported that CBS and Fox could choose a certain number of teams to air a minimum number of times on their air, but without any firm measure of what those numbers are I think there was a tendency to assume that the former number would apply across the board just to simplify things, avoid having to figure out what those teams were, and align with CBS and Fox maintaining their overall conference affiliations (and I think some things some executives said may have contributed to that perception), but clearly there is a discretionary element involved here. (That said, I suspect there is a smaller minimum that does apply across the board.) Eight games makes sense as the overall minimum to apply to the teams the networks choose, and the number of teams they can choose is probably pretty low for the Steelers to be scheduled for only seven CBS games, but even before Swiftmania came to Kansas City the Chiefs were probably one of the teams CBS did choose, which has relevance to the Week 17 flex because it removes any remaining doubt that they protected Dolphins-Ravens.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
So in the early part of this year’s iteration of this feature, I was able to fill this introductory section with some discussion of how the week’s results shaped the flex scheduling picture on a high level, leaving the details for the body of the post. In the middle portion, there seemed to be new articles or news about flex scheduling just about every week, and this section became invaluable as a place for me to leave my comments about them. Now we’re hitting the last few weeks, with only two flex scheduling weeks left, and I’m not sure what to put here. That was already the case a few weeks ago when the surprise announcement of the Week 15 flexes before the Week 13 games bailed me out, but it’s even more acute here. There’s not much in the way of anything general I could say that would apply to both weeks, although the situation in the NFC North does apply to both, and for the most part, the situations themselves are cases where I’m basically twiddling my thumbs waiting for the clock to run out. In the past this would be the last week before a decision on Week 17 flexing needed to be made, but now that there’s a formal six-day window involved there’s one more week to go through before it’s time to make any sort of firm prediction.
I will say that, despite it being responsible for knocking out a week of the Flex Schedule Watch entirely some years ago, and the NFL rendering it worthless last year, I do intend to calculate the percentage chances of each game being moved to Sunday night again. Call me crazy, but as long as I’m doing this feature I should provide some sort of structure and context to the options for the final week as we come down the stretch. Right now I’m mostly providing shots in the dark in terms of what games are in the running and why, and I should get down to business trying to figure out what the actual scenarios are. But it means next week’s post could take a long time to put together again, especially since I’m flying to Seattle next Wednesday, and also I expect John Ourand’s year-end predictions column Monday so I’d likely need to find time to squeeze that and the annual blog-day post in over the course of the week.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
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:
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)
I thought I might have a chance to get this post up before we got too far into the Thursday night game, but the NFL caught me off guard by announcing Week 15 flexes for both Saturday and Monday night on Thursday afternoon. Possible this was driven by the desire not to cut it too close to announce the Saturday games, but regardless there wasn’t any reason not to announce this as early as Tuesday. I think I’m going to have to commit to posting these on Wednesday at the very latest from now on, at least until only six-day flexes are left, if I can find a way to bring myself to do that and have my brain in sufficient working order to do so. I’m going to try to capture my thinking prior to this announcement (and the chart also doesn’t reflect today’s news) and why that makes it all the more surprising.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
Offseason Snapshot | Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists | All-Snub Team
Each November, the Pro Football Hall of Fame names at least 25 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the nominees named in September, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as semifinalists for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so most of the players listed below won’t be inducted this year and some won’t necessarily be inducted at all, but it’s still important to see what players the Hall of Fame voters consider most worthy of induction into the Hall among the currently-eligible players, and we can look at their relevant honors and argue over which players are worthy of induction.