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.