Assessing the 2025 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This year’s NFL schedule seemed to represent a shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy, going bigger in windows where you wouldn’t normally expect them to. Part of that has to do with how many teams the league has that are both good and popular, and how many of those teams play each other, thanks to the NFC East (the most popular, iconic division in football with the defending champions, the reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the single most popular team) being slated to play the NFC North (the next most popular, iconic division in football) and the AFC West (and the always-popular Chiefs plus young star quarterbacks on two other teams). The end result was that almost all the most valuable games to the TV partners were either Tier 1 or involved the Cowboys (who aren’t expected to be very good), with Packers-Steelers (and its potential matchup of Aaron Rodgers against his former team) being the only game outside those categories to be named more than once when I asked the 506sports Discord what the most valuable games were.

Mike North told CBS’ Jonathan Jones that this bounty of high-value games emboldened the league to schedule bigger in its marquee windows, but I never in a million years would have expected the league to schedule Chiefs-Cowboys, probably the two most popular teams in the league right now, on Thanksgiving, when the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game is usually the most popular regular season game of the entire year even when the opponent sucks. Normally you’d expect a game like that to provide a boon to one of the broadcast partners in a regular Sunday afternoon or primetime window, but the league seems to be coming out guns blazing to try and set the record for the most watched regular season game of all time.

Meanwhile, I don’t believe the league has ever scheduled a Tier 1 game for the final week of the regular season when there weren’t three Tier 1-worthy teams in the same division, so I thought for sure they would put the old “Cowboys-Indians” rivalry there despite being the most iconic rivalry involving the league’s most iconic team (after all, it has ended up in the final week before), but no: if form holds the top two teams in the NFC East will have an NFC Championship rematch at the site where that game was played in Week 18, potentially for the division title. (At the other end of the season, though, I wouldn’t put the decision to make the Cowboys Philadelphia’s Opening Night opponent in this category; contrary to popular belief there isn’t really any evidence that the league shies away from marquee games for Opening Night, though I don’t think they’ve gone for the biggest game of the entire year there.)

But this shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy doesn’t seem to have brought with it much of an improvement in how the league schedules the flex-scheduling period to minimize the likelihood that a big game gets stranded with regional distribution. Of course, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But with the increased protections given to CBS and Fox in the new contract that started in 2023, with each network being guaranteed half of each division rivalry and a minimum number of games for the most desirable teams in their respective conference, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I’ve come to realize that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.

(I should note that the division rivalry rule does have some wiggle room, even beyond North’s comments from last year. After all of last year’s Week 18 games were rematches of games slated for the “proper” network, this year Browns-Bengals is scheduled for Week 18 with the game in Cleveland on Fox, and after what happened to Texans-Colts two years ago I’m not going to assume it’s off-limits to a move to NBC or ESPN. More surprisingly, the Cardinals and Seahawks are slated to have one meeting on CBS and the other on a Thursday night, and those are two teams expected to be around .500 so that matchup might be just good enough for Tier 6. But I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that those cases both have one matchup on the other conference’s network, and they aren’t so high-powered that it’s implausible for CBS and Fox to approve of those moves. I don’t think it means the league has the freedom to flex in division-rivalry games or that CBS and Fox have to protect them if they’re rematches of games on another network, given we have firm evidence otherwise. Not that the league can’t flex in such games – see the link above – but it needs to be worth CBS or Fox’s while.)

With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Christmas, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.

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What the 2025 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Wednesday, and as I did last year, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, at least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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Where Will the NFL Draft Go Next?

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Earlier this year the NFL announced what had been widely expected: the 2026 draft will be held in Pittsburgh, PA. Then on Monday the league announced that the 2027 draft would be held in Washington, DC, on the National Mall. Besides being home to storied franchises with strong fanbases, these sites all have something in common with most post-pandemic draft sites:

Since the pandemic, drafts have been hosted in Cleveland, Las Vegas, Detroit, Kansas City, and Green Bay. Of these, only Las Vegas and Detroit have hosted Super Bowls, and only Las Vegas, which received the 2022 Draft as consolation for losing the 2020 Draft to the pandemic, is likely to host a Super Bowl in the future. Before the pandemic, the 2019 Draft was held in Nashville, and before that, the 2018 Draft was held at Jerryworld in Arlington, whose turn hosting Super Bowl XLV was enough of a disaster to seemingly turn the league off to bringing the Big Game back there. Go back further and you end up at the first three drafts to be held after hitting the road and leaving New York, Chicago twice and Philadelphia once – once again, cities unlikely to hold the Super Bowl anytime soon. Since leaving New York in 2015, no city that has hosted more than two Super Bowls has hosted the Draft.

This greatly clarifies which cities might have a shot at hosting the draft in the future. Cities that are regular Super Bowl hosts are probably very low priorities, but the league will also want to travel to as many different cities as possible before re-using cities. Cities with storied franchises and strong fan bases are also probably high on the list of priorities. And it’s also a good idea to have space for not only the draft stage itself (along with the many people trying to watch), but also for various auxiliary activities surrounding the draft, which can take up many times more space than the actual draft stage. Detroit managed to host the draft in a small, awkwardly shaped space where there’s mostly parking and parks, so the league will find a way if it needs to, but the logistics of it, as well as whether or not the draft can be held near a local landmark or with a picturesque backdrop, will still be factors differentiating cities with similar credentials.

I’ve ranked all 30 NFL cities based on how likely I think they are to host the draft in the near future, based on these factors and others. This is a very approximate ranking and shouldn’t be taken to point to who I think will host the 2028 Draft or any other particular future draft. Rather, these are the sites that I think are worth watching and which I think the league will go to in the future. (This post took long enough to put together that it cut into the time I have to put together a mock schedule for this season, so I hope it’s worth it.) Without further ado, let us begin.

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Memo to the NFL: Don’t Foster Pick-Tipping By Slowing Down the NFL Draft

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After a long period of scuttlebutt that the NFL would move the draft to a streaming service, last year we started to get clarity about the future of the draft. First, the Athletic‘s Andrew Marchand confirmed previous reporting that ESPN would retain rights to the draft and share them with a “digital player”, predicting that “you will see two places have the draft in the future”. Of course, right now the draft airs in at least two places, ESPN and NFL Network, but ESPN and the league have engaged in renewed talks for ESPN to acquire NFL Media which would put both networks under one roof. Still, this might seem to suggest that NFL Network’s separate broadcast of the draft might not be long for this world… until Front Office Sports reported the following day that NFLN was, in fact, expected to retain the rights to the NFL Draft beyond this year, while YouTube was in “pole position” to land international distribution rights to the draft.

It’s not clear whether YouTube would be able to distribute its draft broadcast in the United States, though there are enough places for people to catch the draft as it stands that, on the surface, one more wouldn’t hurt. What is clear is that, in all likelihood, YouTube won’t merely be redistributing the ESPN or NFL Network coverage but producing its own oriented towards an international audience that may not be familiar with American football, or at the least college football. That would make it a fourth official draft broadcast to join the traditional broadcasts on ESPN and NFL Network as well as the more human-interest-focused coverage on ABC.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Inductions and Offseason Snapshot

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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.

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Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame: Initial Ballot

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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.

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Introducing Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame

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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.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Finalists

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Offseason Snapshot

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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16

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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.

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An even less belated blog-day.

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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.