Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 11

Since it started in its current format as the NFL’s main primetime package in 2006, the defining feature of NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been the use of flexible scheduling to ensure the best matchups and showcase the best teams as the season goes along. Well, that’s the theory, anyway; the reality has not always lived up to the initial hype and has at times seemed downright mystifying. Regardless, I’m here to help you figure out what you can and can’t expect to see on Sunday nights on NBC.

A full explanation of all the factors that go into flexible scheduling decisions can be found on my NFL Flexible Scheduling Primer, but here’s the Cliffs Notes version with all the important points you need to know:

• The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 17; and week 18. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
• In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturdays in December in recent years – see below).
• During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
• No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
• CBS and Fox may also each protect games, historically in five out of six weeks of the main flex period (whether or not they received an additional protection with the expansion of the main flex period an additional week is unknown), but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
• No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
• According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
• In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
• In Week 18, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 and 2020, respectively, were the first times it showed such games. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET. However, beginning this season, the NFL will also move two games to Saturday to be simulcast on ESPN and ABC.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Week 11 (November 21):

• Selected game: Pittsburgh @ LA Chargers.

Week 12 (November 28):

• Selected game: Cleveland @ Baltimore.

Week 13 (December 5):

• Selected game: Denver @ Kansas City. I know I said I wouldn’t be too surprised by this, but I’m still pretty surprised, since I get the vague sense the Broncos’ decent record might be illusory. It’s especially surprising because Chargers-Bengals had been crossflexed to Fox while Broncos-Chiefs wasn’t, meaning this move involved the LA teams switching networks so Chargers-Bengals could anchor CBS’ early window; flexing it to SNF would have resulted in fewer auxiliary changes. Some people on the 506 forums seemed to semi-seriously suggest Chargers-Bengals might be passed up because of the Bengals being “jinxed” in primetime or at least SNF, but the more plausible suggestion was that the league was clearing a path for potentially flexing in the Bengals next week. See below.

Week 14 (December 12):

• Tentative game: Chicago @ Green Bay
• Prospects: 3-7 v. 8-3. At this point the Packers are more concerned about the first-round bye than the division (and the Bears are concerned about whether their coach will or should finish the season).
• Likely protections: Bills-Bucs (CBS) and Cowboys-Football Team (FOX).
• Other possible games: In the past few weeks Ravens-Browns and Raiders-Chiefs were the only unprotected games involving two teams at or above .500, and NBC is already slated to air the other halves of those divisional matchups. Now, however, Niners-Bengals has joined them. Hmm. (4-6 v. 5-6 might disqualify Falcons-Panthers, certainly at this late date with the Falcons guaranteed to be below .500 when the decision has to be made.)
• Analysis: The Bears are only a 3-point favorite over the winless Lions on Thanksgiving and ESPN’s FPI gives the Lions a better than one-in-three chance of winning. This may be the NFL’s oldest rivalry, but if the Bears end up giving the Lions their first win I’m not sure the league can in good conscience give them a primetime showcase, certainly against a team with a four-and-a-half-game lead over them in the standings playing at home. The thing holding back a potential flex has always been the lack of options that wouldn’t give NBC both halves of a divisional matchup (though if the Bears were that much in freefall that might overcome that), which is where the Niners come in. Beating the Jaguars doesn’t mean much, but the way they beat the Rams last Monday raised the prospect they might be better than their record suggests and could make a strong playoff push down the stretch if they can play like that consistently. If they beat the Vikings at home they could show the Rams game wasn’t a mirage and put themselves in playoff position, cementing Niners-Bengals’ status as a game with major wild card implications in both conferences. Even a Niners loss wouldn’t necessarily rule out the game being flexed in if they keep it close, though if the Bears win as well that would produce a one-game difference between the games’ respective worse teams that wouldn’t overcome the tentative game bias. Did the league hold off on flexing in Chargers-Bengals because of the possibility that it’d result in SNF travelling to Paul Brown Stadium in consecutive weeks? We’ll see.

Week 15 (December 18):

• Selected games: Las Vegas @ Cleveland and New England @ Indianapolis.

Week 15 (December 19):

• Tentative game: New Orleans @ Tampa Bay
• Prospects: 5-5 v. 7-3, a battle of the top two teams in the division – assuming the Saints hold up without Jameis Winston. Right now the Saints are clinging to the playoffs by a thread and have only a half-game advantage over the Panthers and a game over the Falcons.
• Likely protections: Bengals-Broncos if anything (CBS) and Packers-Ravens or Seahawks-Rams (FOX).
• Other possible games: As usual, assuming the games set aside for a potential move to Saturday can’t be protected. If Packers-Ravens is protected, Titans-Steelers and Bengals-Broncos remain the best of the Sunday afternoon slate, with the former being lopsided and the latter involving a team at .500, currently making it better than the tentative only in the sense that it’s a game less lopsided. Panthers-Bills falls into dark horse status ahead of Falcons-Niners.

Week 16 (December 26):

• Tentative game: Washington @ Dallas
• Prospects: 4-6 v. 7-3. The Cowboys have escaped last season’s NFC East mediocrity, which just makes this look lopsided, but the only way this likely gets flexed out is if the Cowboys could have the division on lockdown and have their seed locked in, and since this is now the third-to-last week of the season and the Cowboys are currently in a tie for the 3 seed (and Washington is only a game out of the playoffs), that’s not likely.
• Likely protections: Ravens-Bengals, Bills-Patriots, Steelers-Chiefs, Broncos-Raiders, or nothing (CBS) and Bucs-Panthers, Bears-Seahawks, or nothing (FOX).
• Other possible games: I listed four protection options for CBS this week and somehow all four currently pit two teams at or above .500, along with Rams-Vikings. Bucs-Panthers is a dark horse.

Week 17 (January 2):

• Tentative game: Minnesota @ Green Bay
• Prospects: 5-5 v. 8-3. The Vikings have clawed their way back to .500 and a playoff spot, but the game is still lopsided, and given the quality of Fox’s potentially protected games that just puts the league in a potentially difficult position. If the Packers don’t have anything to play for (though they’re still in a fight for the first-round bye) this still might be a cinch to be flexed out.
• Likely protections: Chiefs-Bengals or Broncos-Chargers (CBS) and Rams-Ravens or Cardinals-Cowboys (FOX).
• Other possible games: Pretty much comes down to whichever game Fox didn’t protect, though Chiefs-Bengals is actually not looking that much worse than Rams-Ravens. Broncos-Chargers and Raiders-Colts involve teams at .500, while Panthers-Saints and Falcons-Bills are dark horses, and Eagles-Presidents could make a late charge.

Week 18 (January 9):

• Tentative game: None (NBC will show game with guaranteed playoff implications).
• Games to watch: Cowboys-Eagles, Bears-Vikings, Panthers-Bucs, Saints-Falcons, Steelers-Ravens, Bengals-Browns, Chargers-Raiders, Niners-Rams, Chiefs-Broncos. The AFC East games could be dark horses as well.