Football

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

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After a week riddled with upsets, it’s looking surprisingly plausible that we might not have any flexes this year. It had started to look like we had a pretty firm group of “bad teams” – in no particular order, the Giants, Bears, Patriots, Broncos, Cardinals, and Panthers, with the possible addition of the Jets – but most of those teams won this past weekend, many against teams perceived to be good, and now the Cardinals and Panthers are the only two teams without multiple wins, and neither was expected to be good enough to warrant primetime appearances – meaning every other team would be 3-4 or better if just one result had gone the other way, which would be strong enough to keep their spot if they had any games in flexible feature windows and even to be in the running to be flexed in. (The last NFC wild card spot is currently held by the 3-3 Bucs in a weak NFC South. That means the Giants and Bears are only a game and a half out of the playoffs.) There’s now a firmer group of the league’s “elite” teams – the Chiefs, Eagles, and 49ers, and after Monday night I’m not so sure about the Niners – than there is a group of firmly “bad” teams.

Of course, in all likelihood the “bad” teams will go back to form in future weeks, but considering the constraints on what games could be flexed in, it’s still looking like a potentially lighter year for flex scheduling than you might think considering the number of games that had been given to mediocre-to-bad teams.

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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

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Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

Apologies for this coming out so late, but I wanted to make sure I got the rules spiel below right and was satisfied with it because I’m probably going to be copy-and-pasting it for years to come. Here’s hoping this is the last time this year I have the dreaded “does not incorporate Thursday night” warning, at least until the last few weeks when I drive myself crazy trying to figure out the Week 18 situations only for the league to blithely steamroll past them!

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.
  • 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.

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Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 8 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Week 8 (SNF early flex #1): Here’s the situation: flexing in any Fox game other than Rams-Cowboys would force Bears-Chargers over to CBS, unless the league is willing to have Fox deliver Los Angeles a “double singleheader” where one game ends up on LA’s MyNet station KCOP. That likely means CBS would have to send Fox one of its games. Meanwhile, CBS currently has three games in the late afternoon window, all of them in the Pacific or Mountain time zones, and four games in the early window. So flexing in any game other than Rams-Cowboys or a CBS late game is going to, in all likelihood, require CBS to send Fox one of its late games. Joe Burrow has looked enough like Joe Burrow the past couple weeks that there’s no reason for CBS not to protect Bengals-Niners, and the other two West Coast games are being hosted by 1-5 teams. So the simplest move for the NFL would be to flex in Rams-Cowboys, except that might be the game Fox wants to keep the most. So the league could end up pressuring Fox not to protect it and let it go to NBC.

Of course, that might be a line of reasoning worthy of a certain commenter of mine. It’s not that difficult for the league to move games around if need be. Fox does have a worthy consolation prize in Eagles-Washington, but that game has lost the potential factor of the Eagles being unbeaten, so now all it has left is potential lopsidedness. Still, I’ve marked Fox as protecting that game partly so I can keep the notation for the Cowboys having six primetime appearances, even though I strongly doubt that’s going to be relevant the rest of the season.

If Fox does protect Rams-Cowboys, what does the league do? The Bears losing to a lackluster Vikings squad has probably sniffed out whatever hope existed that the Bears might have shown enough improvement in the Washington game to justify Bears-Chargers keeping its spot. On the 506sports Discord, the consensus seems to have been that a Washington win would be enough to get Eagles-Washington flexed in even with a Bears win, but I wouldn’t count out Jaguars-Steelers; the Jaguars may be ratings poison, but the Steelers are one of those teams with truly national fanbases, and the Jags do have a star quarterback in Trevor Lawrence. Most importantly, it’s less lopsided and, again, the Eagles don’t have the unbeaten factor that could have overcome that. In my mind, the big problem is that without Jaguars-Steelers, CBS’ cupboard would be pretty bare in the early window; the only game they’d have without a team at 1-5 or worse would be Falcons-Titans, pitting a team that might be worse than their record against a team likely without Ryan Tannehill, both with little buzz outside their home markets. So you’d probably be looking at Eagles-Washington moving over to CBS to serve as the new early-window anchor. But of course, if we’re flexing in a game that’s not Rams-Cowboys we’d be moving games around anyway, so that’s not that big of an obstacle.

To be sure, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see Eagles-Washington flexed in, but I’d like to think the league’s flexing decisions aren’t driven solely by market-based considerations, as much as it can seem that way sometimes. The Eagles would be coming off an SNF game against the Dolphins the previous week, and while the league can and does give teams consecutive SNF games through the flex process sometimes, my inclination is that they won’t do so here when there’s a viable alternative. (The Steelers do play the following Thursday night, but I don’t think that’ll factor into the league’s thinking.)

Final prediction:

  • Los Angeles Rams @ Dallas Cowboys to SNF (if Fox doesn’t protect it).
  • If Fox protects Rams-Cowboys:
    • Jacksonville Jaguars @ Pittsburgh Steelers to SNF.
    • Philadelphia Eagles @ Washington Dead Witches to CBS.
    • Baltimore Ravens @ Arizona Cardinals to Fox.

Introducing the New NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch

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The Bengals have had an unexpectedly slow start to the season with Joe Burrow not being the Joe Burrow the team needs him to be. The much-hyped arrival of Aaron Rodgers with the New York Jets came to an abrupt halt after four plays and no pass attempts – and yet the Jets with Zach Wilson still might be the better New York team, no thanks to Daniel Jones outright regressing after what seemed like a coming out party last year, leaving the Giants to stink up the joint in their primetime appearances so far. The honeymoon for Mac Jones in New England appears to be fast coming to an end as the Belichick-era Patriots may be reaching the end of their relevance. The Bears and Raiders, already questionable choices to get as many featured windows as they got, have been looking downright woeful – at least until the Bears got an unexpected win in Landover on Thursday night. The idea that Sean Payton might be able to fix what went wrong with Russell Wilson last season doesn’t seem to have panned out.

Add it all up, and we could be in for one of the most active seasons for flexible scheduling in a long time… as the NFL’s flexible scheduling regime enters uncharted territory.

I’ve put quite a bit of thought into what I want the Flex Schedule Watch to be since the schedule release back in May, and as I gleaned as much as I could about how flex scheduling will work going forward, I fairly quickly settled on the bones of a new format that I think best reflects how I’ve been conducting the Flex Schedule Watch in recent years, how the NFL has been conducting flex scheduling, and the changes to the flex scheduling regime. Gone are the regimented bullet points of the past, which had become as much restricting as guiding, and in is a new tabular format and more freeform, in-depth analysis. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll work yet – I might not have much to say about most weeks until a couple weeks until the decision has to come down – and I’ll probably work things out as the season goes along, but I have the basic idea at least. In this post I’ll walk through how it works with reference to several key weeks on the schedule. 

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Cantonmetrics: 2024 Preliminary Nominees

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Offseason Snapshot | Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists | All-Snub Team

Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction. 

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The 10 Worst Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Decisions

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For 16 years the Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch has been the most popular part of this blog, in various incarnations, by a significant margin, being most of the reason anyone pays attention to it at all and building a base of commenters with varying degrees of grasp on reality. This season, though, with the start of a new media contract, the extension of flexible scheduling to Monday and Thursday nights means the end of an era for the feature, no longer dedicated to figuring out what single game will be shown on Sunday night in a given week.

For all that my commenters appreciate my insight into flexible scheduling decisions, my record at predicting what the NFL will actually do has never been that great, certainly beyond the most obvious decisions. Part of this is because I’m often fumbling to grasp what the NFL is thinking, especially as they’ve increasingly clearly treated appeasing the Sunday afternoon packages as being of equal if not greater importance, and my philosophy in making picks has often not quite aligned with the league’s. But part of it is also that there have been more than a few times where the league has left me utterly dumbfounded, making decisions that remain inexplicable years later. As the Flex Schedule Watch enters a new era, here’s a look back at the most inexplicable flexing decisions the NFL has made over the 16-year history of this feature. These are based solely on the games the league went with for the Sunday night time slot, not any other flex scheduling decisions they may have made, though I may take a more critical eye at a decision if it left a marquee game in an afternoon time slot with limited distribution. Each week generally links to the first flex-schedule post I made after each decision where I react to each move I didn’t predict, with a link to the post with my final predictions, if different, in parenthesis.

(Technically flexible scheduling for Sunday Night Football has existed for 17 seasons, but a) this blog didn’t exist for most of 2006 and b) there actually were tentative games that first season, but they weren’t publicized. They were apparently reported at some point, but I’m not sure I’d have a quibble with any of the resulting flex decisions; the only real eyebrow-raising one for me is Week 14, more for Fox inexplicably protecting Giants-Panthers over Saints-Cowboys, and I’m only looking at the choices the league made with the options they had. The original tentative that week was Pats-Dolphins, 8-3 v. 5-6 when the decision had to be made, which isn’t great but normally wouldn’t be flex-out material, but I might still have predicted a flex with Saints-Cowboys available, especially considering what happened to the same Pats-Dolphins matchup a few years later.) 

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Building a College Football Super League, Part III: Replacing FBS

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Yesterday we identified the schools that might form a super league and suggested that a 32-team league would strike the best balance between maximizing the value of the schools selected and ensuring a) that Clemson would be among the schools selected, minimizing the possibility that the best team in what’s left of FBS would be able to claim to be the “true” national champion and reducing the incentive for fans to simply declare FBS their college football competition of choice, and b) in turn, convincing Notre Dame that they need to surrender their independence and join the league to maintain their relevance, rather than lending their brand name and relevance to FBS. But there were some tight margins in selecting the last few teams, and we had to stretch a bit to pick Clemson and Notre Dame’s rival Stanford. So whoever’s forming this league could conceivably decide it’s worth it to expand it a bit and remove the stress over justifiably picking those teams, and once they start going down that path it won’t be long before they’ve reached the point of eliminating FBS as a threat to the league’s claim to be the undisputed top tier of college football entirely. It would effectively take less inspiration from the European super league and more from the Premier League, which was effectively a secession of the existing top flight of English football from the established Football League. What schools would that involve? I’m going to try to keep the analysis to a minimum for this post, but I’m not sure I succeeded. 

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Building a College Football Super League, Part II: Selecting the Teams

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Having laid out how I’m going to measure the value of schools when choosing them for a super league, it’s time to actually select the teams. I originally intended not to say a lot and just take the teams, and later on that’s what I’ll do, but I started out expounding at length about why certain teams were being selected or turning up on the list when they did, and ended up saying so much that I ended up breaking it into two parts. This part will cover what I imagine to be the smallest possible league, and we’ll look at larger league sizes tomorrow.

We’ll start with the eight schools most commonly cited as being among college football’s “blue bloods”, listed in order of their value after the academics step:

  1. Texas
  2. Michigan
  3. Notre Dame
  4. Ohio State
  5. Nebraska
  6. Alabama
  7. Oklahoma
  8. USC

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Building a College Football Super League, Part I: Measuring the Value

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I: INTRODUCTION

Earlier this past month, the Pac-12 effectively imploded as a result of its inability to secure a sufficiently attractive media rights deal in the aftermath of USC and UCLA’s departure to the Big Ten, with three schools departing to the Big 12 and two to the Big Ten in a single day. This does mitigate one of the problems with the USC and UCLA move by giving them West Coast partners to play and making them less isolated in that way, but it makes most of the others worse. There are still no schools in the Big Ten between Nebraska and Los Angeles, and we’re now looking at conferences 18, 20, or even more schools in size, with no real steps to make them feel like actual conferences and no real guarantee of a clear conference champion with every conference moving to go without divisions and simply send their top two teams to the conference championship game – only a scheduling and TV rights alliance promising the ability of teams to play the most valuable schools in the conference in football fairly regularly and to earn TV rights fees partly based off of the association with those schools. With an effectively national conference and no divisions, the Big Ten is making its Midwest and Eastern teams in non-revenue sports make the long trek west, or vice versa, all the more often, and to travel decent distances within the West.

It all had the effect of turning my thoughts back towards my wondering what might have been if college football’s biggest schools had decided to leave the auspices of the NCAA and formed a “super league” – whether a relatively modest secession of just the most valuable schools, or a full-fledged split of FBS itself taking most of the Power 5 with it as the Knight Commission proposed – and my desire to create a more robust means of determining what schools might join such a league than I engaged in at the start of the year. The dawning start of the college football season in earnest is as good a time as any to present my more rigorous findings. This post will document my attempt to find a formula to measure the viability of teams for a super league; the next post will attempt to actually identify the teams, and a future post may explore how this affects the conferences for the schools left behind and in other sports. 

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Cantonmetrics: 2024 Senior/Coach/Contributor (Semi)finalists

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Offseason Snapshot | All-Snub Team

This month the Pro Football Hall of Fame began the process of naming its class of 2024. The Senior Committee, tasked with choosing players who last played over 25 years ago, and the Coach/Contributor Committee, tasked with choosing persons who made their mark on football in capacities other than as a player (with coaches required to be retired at least five years), each named lists of at least 25 semifinalists, and this Thursday they further narrowed the field to 12… semifinalists (more on that in a bit). Next month the Senior Committee will choose three finalists while the Coach/Contributor committee will name one, which will move directly to the final stage of consideration in January where the full selection committee will vote up-or-down to induct each candidate into the Hall of Fame. As such most of these candidates won’t be inducted this year and some may never be inducted at all, but we can still see who the Hall of Fame voters consider most worthy among the candidates in each category, who might be likely to be chosen by the committees in future years, and look at the relevant honors and argue over who should be inducted. 

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