The 10 Worst Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Decisions

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.) 

Week 16, 2019: Chiefs-Bears keeps its spot over Saints-Titans (Week 14 post)
Not so much for the decision itself – I predicted Chiefs-Bears would keep its spot in my Week 13 post – as for what led up to it. This was the first time the league pulled a “six-day hold” out of its ass for the penultimate week of the season, leading up to it being an official part of Sunday night flex scheduling in the new contract starting this year, and I figured they wanted to hedge their bets against the Bears being eliminated from the playoffs by game time by putting on a Titans team with no such risks. Naturally, the league announced the game was keeping its spot while the late afternoon games were still going, even though the Bears had lost, and as it happened the Vikings won to knock the Bears out of the playoffs while the Steelers lost to make sure the Titans couldn’t have been eliminated by the time their game kicked off had their game been flexed in. Now, the Steelers’ loss came in the Sunday night game, so NBC probably didn’t want to wait until after the game was over to promote next week’s game, and all else being equal they’d take Chiefs-Bears over Saints-Titans nine times out of ten (especially in light of what happened the next time the league pulled the six-day hold), so I fully understand why this happened the way it did, but it still felt like a waste of time.

Week 17, 2014: Bengals-Steelers over Panthers-Falcons or Lions-Packers (Week 15 post)
This was the precursor to the heartbreak the league would inflict on me eight years later. The Lions and Packers won their Week 16 games to put themselves in a five-way tie for best record in the NFC, setting up a division title game that could have awarded a first-round bye to the winner, but the league hadn’t shown a willingness to that point to put games where the winner would still make the playoffs on NBC, so I could have seen them looking past that game. That’s especially the case because the Panthers and Falcons won to set themselves up at 6-8-1 v. 6-9 with the Falcons holding the tiebreaker over the Saints, creating a division title game, and the NFL had been willing to send NBC a Rams-Seahawks game that would determine whether the NFC West would have a below-.500 champion some years earlier. Instead they went with Bengals-Steelers, a division title game where the loser would still make the playoffs like Lions-Packers, but one where the division leader was coming into the game a half-game back of the first-round bye and there was a very real chance of the game simply determining home field for a rematch the following week. The Bengals still had a Monday night game to play against Peyton Manning and the Broncos who were sitting on the 2 seed, and Bob Costas tried to defend the pick by noting that the Bengals could still miss the playoffs entirely if they lost out, so naturally the Bengals beat the Broncos by nine. But it was still a division title game, so it was still defensible in a way that what happened last year was not. One of my commenters suggested the Packers or the NFL didn’t want to play a post-Christmas night game at Lambeau Field; if only the league had shown such restraint eight years later…

Week 12, 2014: Cowboys-Giants keeps its spot over Lions-Patriots and Cardinals-Seahawks (Last-Minute Remarks)
I had to include at least one example of the league’s preference for “Cowboys uber alles”, but what should I go with? (Frankly I could have filled the entire list up to this point with questionable Cowboys games that kept their spot, but whatever.) My first encounter with this phenomenon made such an impression on me that it colored my approach to the second, so non-flexes that would be completely inexplicable if they didn’t involve the Cowboys, I completely saw coming and completely accepted, even as many other wags moaned about why the league wasn’t backing out of a terrible Cowboys game. “Cowboys uber alles” is probably most egregious when it keeps a potential marquee game stuck with limited distribution. In Week 15 of 2017, Rams-Seahawks was a battle of the top two teams in the NFC West, 9-3 v. 8-4 at the time the decision had to be made, trapped on the late singleheader, and the Cowboys were playing the Raiders, which have a sizable fanbase but are hardly as high-profile as the other NFC East teams, which tend to be the Cowboys’ opponents in these situations. But the Cowboys and Raiders were each 6-6 at the time the decision had to be made with the Raiders tied for the division lead with the Chargers and Chiefs, so keeping the game would have been justifiable even if the Cowboys weren’t involved (though see below).

So I went with this matchup, where a 7-3 Cowboys squad a half-game out of the division lead played a pretty terrible Giants team, allowing Fox to keep two much better matchups. The game trapped in the late slot of the singleheader, Cardinals-Seahawks, had its return matchup already scheduled for NBC, and as we’ll see later that can have an impact on flexing decisions, which blunts somewhat the problems with this non-flex, but this was after crossflexing became a thing and CBS’ late doubleheader slot was anchored by a much more mediocre Dolphins-Broncos contest (5-4 v. 7-2), so it wasn’t like the league had no way out. (This year’s schedule suggests the league is much more willing to deprive a network of a division rivalry it’d otherwise be entitled to if one half is going to the other conference’s network.)

Week 12, 2008: Colts-Chargers keeps its spot over Panthers-Falcons (Last-Minute Remarks)
At the time, I’d yet to fully appreciate the power of the tentative game bias, so it made sense to me that one of two games involving teams no worse than 6-3 would be picked over a game involving two teams hovering right around .500. But since then the NFL has on occasion backed out of games that might otherwise be perfectly okay in favor of games that deserved a bigger spotlight than they were set to receive. Giants-Cardinals appears to have been protected and Panthers-Falcons didn’t have the most name value in the world (with the mighty Jake Delhomme under center for the Panthers), and you can see me start to talk myself into Colts-Chargers being better than their records suggest in the post-mortem, but Panthers-Falcons still wound up stuck in the early doubleheader window (admittedly not as bad as the late singleheader). This was one of the first flex decisions (or non-decisions) that disabused me of the notion that the league was serious about “playing your way into primetime”; within a couple of weeks I was practically begging the league to flex out a 2-9 Seahawks team, unsure they’d pull even such an obvious flex, so scarring this was to me at the time.

Week 12, 2016: Chiefs-Broncos for Patriots-Jets (Last-Minute Remarks)
Now we’re starting to get into decisions I don’t quite understand to this day, and I’m always going to flag a flex where the former tentative ends up being the lead late doubleheader game. On its own, this would seem to be a no-brainer pick; a massively lopsided game between a typically great Brady-Belichick Pats squad and a terrible Jets team, getting swapped for a game between the 7-2 Chiefs and 7-3 Broncos I was stunned wasn’t protected. What made it seem utterly pointless was Pats-Jets being plugged into the late doubleheader spot, effectively switching the places of the two main Sunday windows. The NFL seemed to be in panic mode over the league’s ratings sliding, especially in primetime (this was when conservatives were thumping their chests declaring that “real Americans” were turning away from the league over the Colin Kaepernick protests), but NBC’s Sam Flood seemingly suggested he would have preferred to keep Pats-Jets… which may be a hint as to what really happened here: CBS being willing to relinquish Chiefs-Broncos, allowing it to get full distribution without any markets losing it for another game, to get back a Pats-Jets game it anticipated to do better in the ratings regardless of the teams’ records. (You can see me lay out a scenario where Pats-Jets kept its spot, assuming Chiefs-Broncos was protected, on the Last-Minute Remarks.) Just to make it all the more confounding, this is the only time the Sunday night game of Thanksgiving weekend has been flexed out since NBC took over the Thanksgiving night game.

Week 13, 2020: Broncos-Chiefs keeps its spot over Washington-Steelers/Rams-Cardinals, Browns-Titans, and Giants-Seahawks (Week 10 post)
The COVID year of 2020 was wild, but this didn’t have anything to do with that. I felt the situation was fairly straightforward when I made my post a week before the deadline for a flex; the 8-1 Chiefs looked like they were running away with the division, and the 3-6 Broncos looked to be in no shape to do much of anything. The Broncos won in the intervening week, against a Dolphins team that had been 6-3, only a half-game back in the division, and remained in the think of the wild card hunt, to make the game look a little more respectable, and the new playoff format introduced that year meant the Broncos were only two games out of the playoffs, but there were three teams (including the Dolphins) tied for that last spot so it was going to be an uphill battle to get there, the Chiefs won as well so the game wasn’t any less lopsided, and it’s not like the Broncos have the sort of name value that can overcome a terrible record. For all the limited name value Browns-Titans had, the two teams held the top two wild card spots at 7-3 apiece, so you’d think the league would want to give some exposure to potential playoff teams, and if Rams-Cardinals was unprotected it would bring more name value while involving a slightly worse pair of records and having division implications on top of the wild card.

On top of that, the NFC East was shaping up to be one of the biggest dumpster fires in the history of the league, with the Eagles leading the division at a puny 3-6-1 and everyone else at 3-7, so games involving Washington (playing the then-undefeated Steelers in a game that would have been left unprotected if Rams-Cardinals was protected) and Giants (playing a 7-3 Seahawks team holding the first wild card) would have been better picks if you really felt like a game involving a crappy team was your best option (though flexing in a game involving a team with a worse record than the Broncos would have been a slap in the face to the rest of the league). This one isn’t higher because you could have made the case that the Dolphins win suggested the Broncos were better than their record or were about to go on a run, but on paper it’s the least defensible non-flex the league ever made (certainly the least defensible one not involving the Cowboys). For the record, the Broncos only won one game the rest of the season, though they at least kept it respectable on Sunday night in a 22-16 loss.

Week 16, 2013: Bears-Eagles for Patriots-Ravens, over Saints-Panthers, Colts-Chiefs, or Cardinals-Seahawks (Last-Minute Remarks), OR Week 14, 2013: Panthers-Saints for Falcons-Packers over Lions-Eagles
This situation was a complete mess. The story actually starts in Week 11, the week of the still-infamous “protection override” where CBS had protected a marquee Chiefs-Broncos game only to “voluntarily” relinquish it to get it out of the late singleheader and save NBC from likely keeping a game with a 2-6 team (admittedly said team being the Giants in a year the NFC East was a tire fire and playing the Packers), but likely resulting in the league owing CBS one (especially given rules in place at the time to ensure the league didn’t take too many more games from one Sunday afternoon package than the other). I actually thought the decision to flex in Panthers-Saints was something of a no-brainer at the time (and my enthusiasm for the game was probably influenced by the fact I’d started mildly rooting for the Panthers after Cam Newton’s breakout rookie season and the high-powered offense he led was only enough to drag the Panthers to a 6-10 record), but you can see me start to realize that flexing in that game had the potential to tie the league’s hands when the return match came around. It all came to a head with the Week 16 flex, when the league flexed out Patriots-Ravens only to make it CBS’ new lead late doubleheader game (and you’ve already heard what I think of that) and replaced it with, not the Saints-Panthers rematch, not a Colts-Chiefs game I thought was questionable for CBS to leave unprotected to begin with and became more so as the season progressed, not even an 8-5 v. 11-2 Cardinals-Seahawks game that wouldn’t have come out of CBS’ slate, but Bears-Eagles, with the Bears sitting at .500.

But the problem with that pick goes beyond the disappointing records of the teams. Remember what I said about the NFC East being a tire fire? The Eagles had a respectable 8-5 record by that point, but Eagles-Cowboys still looked to be in good shape to be a division title game, and as it happened, heading into the week the loser of the game would be guaranteed to play a division title game the next week. The Cowboys won to set up their division title game regardless of the Bears-Eagles result, and perhaps NBC and the NFL would have picked it regardless over the NFL’s oldest rivalry in Bears-Packers (because Cowboys), but as the announcement came at halftime that Eagles-Cowboys would be the SNF game (with Bears-Packers going in either the early or late doubleheader window depending on the outcome of that night’s game, which the Eagles won) it looked likely, and ended up happening, that Tony Romo would miss the next week and Aaron Rodgers wouldn’t, and while both games were decided by a single score Bears-Packers had the more memorable, thrilling finish. I’m not sure how much the NFL actually takes the ability to announce the final week’s games into account when announcing a game to flex in the penultimate week, but I feel like this is a good argument for why they should.

Week 17, 2022: Steelers-Ravens for Rams-Chargers, over Dolphins-Patriots, Panthers-Bucs, and Jets-Seahawks (Last-Minute Remarks before six-day hold, Week 15 post)
As the Rams stumbled to the worst season for a defending Super Bowl champion in history, and as the Chargers got flexed in twice meaning this game had to be flexed out to get them under six primetime appearances, the NFL had a problem as most of the teams in the most viable tentatives started to stumble down the stretch. Jets-Seahawks seemed to be the favorite for much of the season, but the Jets collapsed down the stretch and the Seahawks didn’t look terribly impressive in their own right; meanwhile, the Patriots were in the playoff hunt for much of the year but had their own struggles down the stretch, especially with one of the worst plays of the year against the Raiders in what would normally be their last game before the league would have to make a decision, and even the Dolphins were having their own struggles down the stretch. With most of the games in consideration involving teams on the outskirts of wild-card consideration, and Panthers-Bucs, a game with a decent chance to decide the NFC South (and with the presence of Brady offsetting being 7-8 v. 6-9), possibly not being an option due to the tight turnaround to the ReliaQuest Bowl at Raymond James Stadium the following afternoon (and that wasn’t just idle speculation; when that Patriots-Raiders game had been flexed out of SNF it forced the Las Vegas Bowl the previous day to an earlier window), it was understandable that the league elected to pull their second “six-day hold”, still before that became an official part of the new contracts.

In terms of both setting the Week 18 game and ensuring the maximum likelihood that both teams had as much to play for as possible before game time, I felt that the league’s best choice, if Panthers-Bucs wasn’t an option, was Dolphins-Pats, as the Dolphins were sitting in the 7 seed with the Patriots a game back. The main obstacle, I felt, was whether or not it would leave the cupboard too bare for CBS in the early window; were the Steelers, on the periphery of the playoff picture, good enough to anchor the early window even with their sizable fanbase and playing in the premier rivalry in the AFC North since that division’s creation, or would Fox have to crossflex them Panthers-Bucs, Browns-Washington, or even (if they hadn’t protected it) Saints-Eagles? The idea that the league would move Steelers-Ravens to primetime didn’t even cross my mind; if Steelers-Ravens was good enough for SNF it surely was good enough to anchor the early window, removing the one main obstacle to picking Dolphins-Patriots, but with Dolphins-Pats in the early window, Rams-Chargers in the late window, and Steelers-Ravens in primetime, the potential existed for Dolphins and Chargers wins to knock the Steelers out of the playoffs before their game kicked off, which would help the Ravens in their own fight for playoff position and the AFC North, and which wouldn’t be an issue if the Dolphins and Steelers games were reversed. Nor was this justifiable from the perspective of being able to announce the Week 18 SNF game as early as possible; Jets-Dolphins and Bengals-Ravens were both in the running there, but Jets-Dolphins needed a lot more to go its way to move to Sunday night. (As it happened, the league got lucky as the Steelers weren’t eliminated by game time and knocked off the Ravens to keep their playoff hopes alive entering the final week, but only the Saturday games were announced before NBC signed off, and only at the end of the game.)

In a vacuum, earlier in the season, flexing in Steelers-Ravens might have been justifiable, and I could understand the league’s hesitance to feature the Patriots after the whatever-the-opposite-of-a-miracle-is in Vegas, or the Dolphins after their flexed-in game against the Chargers drew terrible ratings. But in this situation, after the league bent their rules to introduce a six-day hold for the second time? At best it represented the league panicking after the poor ratings for Dolphins-Chargers and, somewhat more inexplicably, another flexed-in game in Washington-Giants, an NFC East rivalry between two teams in playoff position that had tied two weeks earlier, meaning that game would almost certainly determine the order of finish between them. At worst? It was, in retrospect, an early warning sign that the NFL was willing to throw out its principle of fair competition that had governed its scheduling of the final week since the advent of the all-division-games era to showcase two name teams for the sake of ratings, and in that, served as a prelude to what would happen the very next week…

Week 18, 2022: Lions-Packers over Titans-Jaguars and Bengals-Ravens
This one was so controversial that Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth themselves referenced the controversy while the game itself was going on (and if it weren’t for that I might have placed Steelers-Ravens ahead of it). In the end, the league lucked out: even though the Seahawks’ win earlier in the day eliminated the Lions from the playoffs, the Lions still played hard for 60 minutes and dragged the Packers out with them, ending Aaron Rodgers’ tenure in Green Bay. Before, and especially during and after, the game, there was talk that of course the Lions would play hard even if they had nothing to play for, because they wouldn’t want to lay down against a division rival, they’d want to make sure that if they couldn’t make the playoffs, at least their rivals wouldn’t either. But you wouldn’t have to look far to find precedent showing that wasn’t necessarily the case; in fact, you’d only need to look two years earlier.

Remember how the NFC East was a dumpster fire in 2020? In the end, the last regular-season Sunday night game that year pitted Washington against Philadelphia; the Eagles had already been eliminated from the division, but Washington would win the division with a win and fall behind the Giants-Cowboys winner with a loss. Washington was only up by three entering the fourth quarter, but coach Doug Pederson pulled Jalen Hurts for a backup who hadn’t played all season, who proceeded to throw the game away (by throwing the ball to the men in maroon). Pederson was roundly excoriated, and ultimately fired (though the Eagles’ final 4-11-1 record probably had more to do with that than the specific events of the 11th loss), but there was nothing suggesting that any other coach or team in the same position wouldn’t do the same thing. (Washington and Philadelphia weren’t exactly the strongest of rivals in the NFC East – one of the accusations leveled at Pederson was that he was intentionally trying to screw the Giants, who’d beaten the Cowboys earlier in the day, implying that he might have hated the Giants more than the “Football Team” – but with their decades of mediocrity-at-best in the Super Bowl era, Detroit is probably every other NFC North team’s weakest rival, though the Packers probably engendered a decent amount of bad blood just because of their success under Favre and Rodgers.)

In the aftermath, I called this week the worst flex decision of the entire flex-scheduling era, but that really was more about the league’s choice of Saturday games, and specifically the decision to put Chiefs-Raiders in that slot, which would have taken #1 by a mile if it were the subject of this entry. I was sympathetic to the position the league was in: among the games I would normally consider contenders for Sunday night, NBC would much rather have had Ravens-Bengals than Titans-Jaguars, but Ravens-Bengals would only be for the division if the Bengals had lost to the Bills in what ended up being the Damar Hamlin game, otherwise it would need to be scheduled such that the Ravens neither had their seed locked in by game time, nor locked up any other team’s seed, with the added confounding factor that the game probably couldn’t move to Saturday with the Bengals playing the preceding Monday. (Indeed I saw some speculation that the Steelers-Ravens flex was partly about cutting down the rest discrepancy vis-a-vis the Bengals, potentially making a Saturday move justifiable.) But the league ended up announcing Lions-Packers as the Sunday night game before Bills-Bengals even started, so clearly the league and NBC weren’t holding out for Bengals-Ravens being an option, so they could have just as easily gone with Titans-Jaguars.

On Saturday, the league was limited in its options if it put Titans-Jaguars on Sunday night, but I determined that they could have gone with Browns-Steelers (with the Steelers being the last team in the AFC wild card pecking order, meaning their game didn’t affect what anyone else had to play for) and Cowboys-Washington (a Cowboys loss would clinch the division for the Eagles, but if they played at the same time as the Niners they’d still have the 1 seed to play for). The cascading effects of what games had to be played simultaneously would have resulted in a crowded late window, but if that was too much of a concern for the league and they really wanted to take a West Coast game, they could have replaced Cowboys-Washington with Cardinals-Niners; a Niners win would lock the Vikings into the 3 seed, but the league had shown previously that it didn’t consider the 2 seed that important to play for once it didn’t come with a first round bye, and the Vikings were playing the Bears who would finish with the worst record in the league, so all it would affect was the draft order. Any of those three games would have been acceptable accompaniments to Titans-Jaguars if the league really wanted to put that game on Saturday.

Chiefs-Raiders, on the other hand, should have been completely off-limits, at least if the league had to announce the Saturday games on Sunday night. Here’s the problem: if the Damar Hamlin game had been played to completion with the Bills winning, and the Chiefs had gone on to beat the Raiders, the Bills would have been locked into the 2 seed… and they were playing a Patriots team that was holding on to the last wild card spot over the Dolphins and Steelers by tiebreakers. A team with nothing to play for playing to eliminate a rival from the playoffs when they’re not in the playoffs themselves is one thing, but a team that is in the playoffs with nothing to play for will absolutely rest their starters, since they actually have more games to rest them for. (Chargers coach Brandon Staley came under fire for not resting his starters down the stretch of his team’s game against the Broncos after the Ravens’ loss locked them into the 5 seed – which just showed that Bengals-Ravens should have been played in the late window even if it wasn’t for the division.) There was a very real possibility that the league had just set up the Steelers and Dolphins to look on helplessly as the Bills sent out a B-team for the Patriots to run roughshod over on their way to the playoffs… and if the league didn’t think the 2 seed was worth playing for, that might well have happened regardless of the Bills-Bengals result. (In that sense, the league lucked out here too, in a morbid way: the Hamlin situation gave the Bills all the motivation they needed to “win one for the Hammer” regardless of whether they actually had any playoff positioning to play for, and the end result ended up clearing the path for the Dolphins to make the playoffs.)

But that’s Saturday. As I said, if this entry were about Chiefs-Raiders it would have been #1 by a mile; you could at least talk yourself into Lions-Packers for the Sunday night game if you really wanted to. It did effectively represent a further betrayal of the principles that had seemingly animated flex scheduling decisions for the past decade, but it was still comprehensible enough to open the door for another move to take the top spot on the list…

Week 15, 2015: Cardinals-Eagles for Bengals-Niners, over Texans-Colts, Panthers-Giants/Bears-Vikings, Packers-Raiders, or Bills-Washington (Last-Minute Remarks)
With most bad flex decisions, I can kind of see the logic behind them if I squint, even if I don’t agree with them. In 2013, the league may have been in a position where they needed to flex in a Fox game, couldn’t take Saints-Panthers two weeks after Panthers-Saints, and Cardinals-Seahawks wasn’t going to bring in anywhere near as much name value as Bears-Eagles. In 2022, the league was scared by the bad ratings for the Dolphins and the embarrassment the Patriots had just made of themselves, and decided to roll the dice on a marquee rivalry; then, the Titans and Jaguars may well have been the two least TV-friendly teams in the league compared to the name value brought by two NFC North teams, and the rivalry between the teams, even if not on the order of Bears-Packers or even Vikings-Packers, is still bitter enough that you could talk yourself into the Lions playing hard even if they’d been eliminated from the playoffs, as they did. But this? This made absolutely no sense whatsoever and left me flailing for any sort of potential explanation for WTF happened here.

Start by recognizing, as with the 2022 moves, the bad position the league was in. The 49ers were sitting at 4-8 and tied for the worst record in the NFC, which is normally flex-out material but could keep its spot in the right circumstances. Those circumstances didn’t apply to this game: the Cardinals were running away with the division and their 10-2 record tied them for the best record in the league with, among others, the Bengals, meaning it was going to be, on paper, a massively lopsided game with zero playoff implications for the Niners. On the other hand, there wasn’t much in the way of good options; Texans-Colts, possibly the next-least TV-friendly two teams in the league (and with the Texans already having their game against the Patriots flexed in the previous week), was the only available game involving two teams at or above .500 (Broncos-Steelers, at 10-2 v. 7-5, was reportedly protected), and both of them were sitting at 6-6, though they were also tied for the division lead. The Bills game could have joined them if the Bills’ opponent had managed to beat the Cowboys on Monday night, but they didn’t. So the league was looking at games involving teams only a game better than the Niners.

That’s not to say the league didn’t have options in that group. The Panthers were undefeated and playing an NFC East team in the Giants, so the game being more lopsided than Bengals-Niners was outweighed by the Panthers’ quest for history and the Giants’ name value – and the NFC East was a tire fire again that season, so with Washington’s loss the Giants were actually tied for the division lead. Fox could have protected that game, but that would have opened the door for Bears-Vikings, an NFC North rivalry with the Vikings fighting the Packers for the division lead and the Bears sitting two games back of the Seahawks for the second wild card with an outside chance of climbing into the division race (though the Vikings were renting the University of Minnesota’s home field at the time as US Bank Stadium was built, and were limited in how many primetime games they could play there). The same pair of records, and the same place in the wild card race for the team with the inferior record, described Packers-Raiders. Heck, the league could have gone with Bills-Washington anyway; the Bills were sitting a game back of the wild card, Washington was part of the tie at the top of the NFC East, and the Bills have a devoted fanbase while Washington has the sort of draw that comes with the territory of being an NFC East team.

Instead, the league went with Cardinals-Eagles.

Now, the Eagles were part of that tie at the top of the NFC East, so it’s not like taking a game involving them was completely indefensible, but the only worse game involving a 5-7 team the league could have taken was Dolphins-Chargers, where the Chargers were sitting at a lowly 3-9. The Cardinals sitting at 10-2, making it the second-most lopsided game involving a 5-7 team without the intrigue of the Panthers’ quest for an unbeaten season (or the possibility of being protected), would be one thing, but the Cardinals had a three-game lead over the Seahawks for the division and a two-game lead over the Packers and Vikings for the first-round bye, while trailing the Panthers by two for the 1 seed. So the Cardinals didn’t have much room to change their playoff fate and stood to potentially clinch their division by game time; they probably wouldn’t be in position to rest their starters, but that just meant the game shaped up to be a blowout that wouldn’t even mean that much for the winning team.

But it gets worse than that. Picking Cardinals-Eagles maxed the Eagles out on primetime appearances, and the league, at the time, hadn’t yet declared that the final week of the regular season was exempt from primetime appearance limits. A tire fire like the NFC East is particularly likely to produce a potential Sunday night division title game where the loser misses the playoffs, and Eagles-Giants was shaping up to be a better candidate for that game than Washington-Cowboys with the Cowboys at 4-8. The Giants and Packers would have been maxed out as well with the Packers playing the Vikings in another potential division title game in the final week, but if you’re going to rule out Eagles-Giants anyway I would think Panthers-Giants would have been a better choice (though Giants-Vikings was also a candidate to be flexed in Week 16, and eventually was, so you could argue the league was preparing for that eventuality ruling out Eagles-Giants anyway). If the league’s hands were truly tied as much as they could be – they didn’t want to put the Texans on Sunday night in consecutive weeks with both being flex-ins, they didn’t want to risk the Panthers losing in the intervening week leaving them with just a game that was more lopsided than Cardinals-Eagles (or rule out their ability to take Giants-Vikings, or Fox protected Panthers-Giants), putting Bears-Vikings on Sunday night wasn’t an option, and they didn’t want to max out the Packers – they still could have gone with Bills-Washington, pitting a team tied for the NFC East lead with a team in the thick of the AFC wild card race, two teams only a game apart in record and so looking to be substantially more competitive.

But leave aside all the other, better options the league had at their disposal for a second and just compare the game to the tentative. Both games had 10-2 teams, and the Eagles were just a game better than the Niners, making it barely any less lopsided. The Niners were three games out of the playoffs (and so stood to be potentially eliminated by game time) as opposed to tied for the lead in a bad division, but the Bengals were tied with the Patriots and Broncos for the best record in the AFC, so one game could make a difference between getting home field throughout the playoffs and not even getting a first-round bye (at a time when two teams got first-round byes in each conference). Sure you’d prefer a game with playoff implications (no matter how minimal they were for the Cardinals) for both teams, but if Cardinals-Eagles was genuinely the best alternative the league had at its disposal, I would have expected the tentative game bias to hold.

What ultimately happened? Well, the Cardinals maintained their three-game lead over the Seahawks the week after the decision, which I think left the Seahawks’ chances to win the division hanging on to a common-games tiebreaker entering Sunday night, but the Cardinals’ standing vis-a-vis the Panthers and Packers also didn’t change (while the Niners were officially eliminated from the playoffs). And when Sunday night rolled around, the Cardinals predictably blew the Eagles out of the building to the tune of a 40-17 win, the most lopsided game of the entire week, and SNF‘s second-lowest rated and third-least watched game of the entire year. (The only lower-rated game was Giants-Vikings the following week, which was also one of only two games NBC aired that was more lopsided.) Texans-Colts and Panthers-Giants, meanwhile, were both one-score games. Thankfully the week’s results also eliminated any hope of Eagles-Giants being a division title game, as Washington took a one-game lead for the division and clinched the conference games tiebreaker over the Giants (and clinched the division outright the following week), and in fact Packers-Vikings came out of the week the only traditionally viable candidate for the Week 17 Sunday night game, ultimately paying off as a division title game.

In retrospect, even though it was an actual flexing decision, this was the final nail in the coffin for the “play your way into primetime” notion; some teams have a far more uphill task than others to “play their way into primetime”, namely the entire AFC South and the pre-Josh Allen Bills. The events at the end of last season might have actually made this decision more understandable… if this same season didn’t make those events look all the worse; as the Giants-Vikings game continued into the second half with no announcement of the Week 17 Sunday night game, there was enough buzz around Jets-Bills potentially being taken to placate Fox that Packers-Vikings ultimately being chosen despite the loser still being in line to make the playoffs seemed to be active vindication for the league’s philosophy in the final week they so brutally betrayed last year.

Honorable mentions (in chronological order):

• Week 11, 2007: Patriots-Bills for Bears-Seahawks, over Washington-Cowboys, Panthers-Packers, or Chiefs-Colts (the very first flex schedule week in the history of this feature, and as such I ended up missing that the Bills had climbed back to .500 or that Washington-Cowboys at 5-3 v. 7-1 was probably a better alternate choice than the barely-less-lopsided-than-Pats-Bills games I focused on featuring .500 teams of their own, but while getting as many cracks at the Pats in their 16-0 season was understandable, this was still awfully lopsided on paper and produced only the tenth-highest rated SNF game of the year)
• Week 13, 2007: Bengals-Steelers keeps its spot over Titans-Texans and Lions-Vikings (Last-Minute Remarks) (even with the Bengals at 3-7 this game keeping its spot was always within the realm of possibility, but this may have contributed to my frustration with the tentative game bias the following season)
• Week 14, 2010: Eagles-Cowboys keeps its spot over Chiefs-Chargers and Dolphins-Jets (Last-Minute Remarks) (the first piece of evidence for the “Cowboys uber alles” rule)
• Week 13, 2012: Eagles-Cowboys keeps its spot over Seahawks-Bears and Bucs-Broncos (Last-Minute Remarks) (the other major example of “Cowboys uber alles” not involving a hot game stranded on the singleheader – Bucs-Broncos actually did end up the late singleheader game, but the “protection override” hadn’t happened yet so I didn’t know how the league saw that window, and Seahawks-Bears had the exact same pair of records at 7-3 v. 6-4 so it’s not like either one of them was an overwhelming choice)
• Week 15, 2017: Cowboys-Raiders keeps its spot over Rams-Seahawks (see above)
• Week 13, 2021: Broncos-Chiefs for Niners-Seahawks over Chargers-Bengals (Last-Minute Remarks) (a defensible choice based on the teams’ records, but Chargers-Bengals, as a matchup of two young quarterbacks, seemed like the clearly superior choice, and I wasn’t sure the Broncos’ record wasn’t illusory; I thought this might be to clear the path to flex in the Bengals the following week, but they didn’t, leaving this probably the decision that came closest to making the list without actually getting there, aside from the Cowboys decisions)

Here’s to another 17 years, and many more, of flexible scheduling. I’d like to hope that the expansion of the flex scheduling regime will bring more comprehensible decisions than the ones listed here, but two of the top three coming in the last two weeks of last season doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, and if those events point to a change in the flex scheduling philosophy in the league offices, we’re more likely to get more bizarre, incomprehensible decisions than ever.