Introducing the New NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch

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. 

The first thing to note is that the changes to flex scheduling are extensive enough that for this season, I will not be updating the Flex Scheduling Primer. There’s too much unknown about exactly how it works or how the league will be using it as the season goes along, and a lot of the historical examples I use on that page might be of limited usefulness – to say nothing about how the mess at the end of last year scrambled a lot of my assumptions in ways I still don’t know how to deal with. (Also, the NFL’s own flex schedule page has finally been substantially updated, though as the significant amount of unknowns suggests, still leaves out a lot of behind-the-scenes elements.) You can still refer to the Primer for how flex scheduling used to work before this year. For now, let’s walk through what we know about how flex scheduling has changed – much of it taken from this post but also from information gleaned since then. We’ll save anything relating to Thursday night flex scheduling for just a bit, and for the moment, stick to Sunday and Monday nights.

• Flex scheduling now applies to Monday Night Football, starting in Week 12, in addition to the existing Sunday night flex scheduling.
• Sunday night games in Week 14-17 may be moved on six days notice. (The NFL has already done this twice in the penultimate week of the season, but now it’s an official part of the flex scheduling procedures.)
• Each team is now allotted seven primetime appearances. Primetime appearances seem to count all games in primetime windows, and no games outside of primetime, regardless of what package they belong to; thus, Amazon’s Black Friday game and NBC’s late-afternoon game on the Saturday before Christmas do not count, but the Peacock primetime game that Saturday does. I don’t know if the limit of four games on NBC still applies or if any limits apply to games on ESPN, but I don’t think the NBC limit ever came into play separately from the more general primetime limit, so it’s not going to affect my considerations.
• According to Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill, the Sunday afternoon networks are now guaranteed at least one half of each division rivalry in their respective conference. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate, as several Week 18 games have their first halves on the other conference’s network, including the Cowboys at Washington, whose first half is on CBS on Thanksgiving. However, they’re all on the other conference’s network; none of them are part of primetime packages, and that might be significant.
• Mulvihill also confirmed for me that “without revealing too much [networks are allowed to protect games in the main flex period] significantly closer to each game date.”

When might those later protections come down? Well, the situation surrounding Thursday night flexing may provide a clue. According to Sports Illustrated‘s Albert Breer, the original Thursday night flex proposal in March would have given teams 28 days’ notice that their game could be moved to Thursday night, with the actual decision coming with 15 days’ notice. The implication is that CBS and Fox would have submitted protections at that 28-day mark. The proposal that actually passed in May made the actual flexing decision come with 28 days’ notice. Generalizing this to all primetime flex scheduling would imply that protections would need to come down five weeks in advance – as protecting games from being moved to Thursday night 28 days before that Thursday night would mean that, at most, the only game in the week four weeks before the week in question that the networks would have to work with would be that week’s Thursday night game. (In other words, for the Week 14 Thursday night game, the deadline for protections would be the day of the Week 10 Thursday night game.) My first instinct was that it implied a four-week window for protections, which would be a neater number to work with, but even if the window was relative to Sunday, the window for announcing a flex one week in advance has been six days in advance, and with rare exceptions those decisions have come down on the preceding Sunday. That being said, apparently in March the league needed to check whether its agreements with CBS and Fox would allow them to make Thursday night flex decisions 28 days in advance, which could suggest that CBS and Fox’s protection deadline was normally less than five weeks in advance.

In theory, the window for protections to be submitted could be as early as six weeks before game date (which would mean protections for Week 11 would still be due after Week 5) or as late as right before the decision needs to come down, but barring any further reporting on the matter I’m going to be working under the assumption that protections in the main flex period will come down four or five weeks in advance, and that protections in the early flex period work as before with CBS and Fox being able to protect games at any time until the decision needs to be made. This means that, going forward, I’m likely not to start the Flex Schedule Watch (barring potential early flexes for Weeks 5-8) until Week 6, which is not only five weeks before Week 11, but marks the one-third mark of the season, as well as a point where there starts to be enough separation between teams that you can start to make informed conclusions about which teams are actually good or not based on their record and not subjective analyses of who they’ve beaten or not. In the meantime, here are the other rules governing Thursday night flexes:

• Thursday night flexible scheduling begins Week 13 – somewhat surprising, as at least this year, that’s the week after Thanksgiving, where the league generally schedules a game between two teams that played on Thanksgiving, which could be broken up with flex scheduling.
• The league may apply flexible scheduling to Thursday nights no more than twice a year, and no team may be flexed into Thursday night more than once.
• No team may play on Thursdays following Sundays more than twice a season, and reportedly, no more than one Thursday road game following a Sunday game.

These last two rules on how often teams can play Thursday games have the effect of preventing more than half the league from having road games flexed into Thursday night, making it easier to list which games can be flexed into Thursday night than can’t. This was actually one of the last things that helped solidify what the new Flex Schedule Watch would look like, and now we can finally take a look at what it actually will look like. Let’s start with Week 11, where only the Sunday night game is flexible and currently features a pair of pretty dire teams in the Vikings and Broncos.

The top section shows the four main featured windows and what games were scheduled there at the start of the year. The Thursday night and Monday night windows are grayed out, indicating that they can’t be flexed this week. Note that while I’m including the featured late afternoon game in the listed windows, I’m not going to give it much coverage in my analysis and won’t be predicting changes to it very often unless the game is truly dire, especially given the ability to move a game into that window without necessarily featuring it, and especially given the complexities of messing with the afternoon schedule in general, particularly the league’s desire to make sure the singleheader and early doubleheader windows have viable anchor games as well. Each game in a Sunday afternoon window has the network they’re currently slated for, CBS or Fox, indicated below. Going forward I’m only going to predict one possible protection for each network and use the associated text to list other possible protections; however, I reserve the right to list multiple possible protections depending on which week they were due. Predicted protections are indicated by the “Protect?” text. (Protections probably aren’t due until next week at the earliest, but it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be any different from what’s shown – with a caveat I’ll get to in a sec.)

On the bottom left of each game’s space is the “Buzzmeter”, which measures the attractiveness of each game based solely on the record of the worse team in the game, as shown by both the length of the bar and color of the background. (My original idea was for the bar itself to change from red to green as it got longer, but Excel’s conditional formatting doesn’t seem to allow for that.) I’m also going to generally limit the number of alternatives shown to four games, although that may grow the week before the decision has to come down in order to list every potential option; here, Titans-Jaguars and Chargers-Packers are additional games pitting teams at 2-3 against teams at .500 or better.

Right now, this week poses an interesting conundrum for the NFL and its partners. Bucs-Niners is clearly the best game on the Sunday slate, but it’s also Fox’s only game involving two teams both above .500; Chargers-Packers, at 2-2 v. 2-3, is its next best game. But also, as it stands Bucs-Niners would be trapped in late singleheader purgatory, so if these records hold, the league may want to put pressure on Fox to let the game go to NBC. Perhaps CBS ends up sending one of its games to Fox to redress the balance. Obviously a lot can change between now and Week 9, but this situation could be one to watch as the season goes along.

Now let’s fast-forward to Week 15, where Chargers-Raiders could be at risk of being flexed out of TNF, and where we find the NFL Network Saturday tripleheader to add some more complexity to the mix. This week, we’ve added another section between the top and bottom sections listing the games set aside for a possible move to Saturday. The SNF section also indicates that it can be flexed as late as six days in advance.

Many games here, including both the Sunday late-afternoon feature and Sunday night games, have “TNF [check]” indicators in the bottom right, indicating that these games can be flexed to Thursday Night Football. (However, games already in featured windows are unlikely to move.) The Steelers-Colts game has its TNF indicator with an asterisk, indicating that the Steelers play on Thursday night the previous week and so wouldn’t have short rest, but that in turn means they would have a massive rest advantage over the Colts; it, too, is highly unlikely to move any earlier than Saturday. Looking at this slate, it looks like Eagles-Seahawks is likely to be flexed into Monday night for Chiefs-Patriots, and that NFLN could be stuck with some pretty dire games on its Saturday slate. Chargers-Raiders seems decently likely to keep its spot, especially as the previous and following weeks have games that seem to be at risk of a Thursday night flex.

Finally, let’s take a look at the most urgent situations, the three remaining early flex weeks, each of which has at least one disappointing team. Charts for early flex weeks will only show the Sunday night and late Sunday afternoon games, with the Thursday and Monday night games not showing up even grayed out. Note also the “DAL: 6 PT” indicator, indicating a game that would max a team out on primetime appearances if it were to be flexed in. (In this case it shouldn’t be a factor: after this the only game the Cowboys have outside a featured window until the end of the season is against the lowly Panthers. All their other Sunday afternoon games should be protected.)

Over the course of the last contract, the early flex was only used, and really only ever discussed, with regards to a team with an injured star player (or a potentially game-postponing COVID situation). We haven’t seen an early flex get used for a team that’s just plain bad before, but through the first four weeks the Bears looked dire enough that if any team would warrant it it would be them. Their surprise Thursday night win in Landover may have stopped the bleeding, though, and a home win over the equally-1-4 Vikings might lend itself to the narrative that the team just might have righted the ship and wouldn’t be a complete disaster on Sunday night – especially since the Chargers are having a disappointing season of their own. Still, this is the only remaining early flex candidate with a team with only one win, and there are certainly opportunities here, which don’t necessarily exist in the other weeks.

Even if Saints-Colts is 4-2 v. 4-2 while the 2-3 teams in other Fox games fall to 2-4, it seems likely that Fox would protect a game involving an NFC East team over Saints-Colts; it would be a pretty big gap and the NFC East games might not be realistic candidates to be flexed in, but it just doesn’t seem like a game Fox would put that much importance on, and if worst came to worst they might protect Browns-Seahawks over Saints-Colts. By the same token, there’s no guarantee Saints-Colts would be flexed in even if it were the best game, and if Washington or the Rams win to get to 3-3 the league would probably prefer to flex one of those games in. There probably isn’t a reason for CBS to move away from protecting Bengals-Niners, so this is probably a situation where the winner of the Colts-Jaguars game becomes the top contender for a Sunday night move depending on what the teams in the other contending games, including the tentative, do. The Steelers are on bye so a Jaguars win would put that game at 4-2 v. 3-2, which could be mighty tempting even if Bears-Chargers is 2-4 v. 3-2, but could still be vulnerable to a game involving an NFC East team with both teams at 3-3 or better – until you factor in afternoon scheduling logistics.

Basically, if Bears-Chargers gets flexed out for a Fox game that isn’t Rams-Cowboys, either CBS would likely have to give Fox a game in order to take on Bears-Chargers, or Fox would have to give LA a “double singleheader” airing Bears-Chargers on KCOP. That could result in the league leaning on Fox to leave Rams-Cowboys unprotected if the Jaguars lose, and could make any other Fox game highly unlikely, with Browns-Seahawks probably off the table entirely – especially since it’s currently the late singleheader game going to the home markets of teams with CBS early games. On the other hand, flexing in an early CBS game could also result in some logistical headaches, maybe even bigger ones, as without any games switching networks CBS would end up with three early games and four late games, which generally isn’t acceptable, and Chiefs-Broncos is the furthest east of the 4:25 games so none of them can just be moved to the early window, so you’d still need to swap games between networks (unless CBS elects to leave Bengals-Niners unprotected and run with Chiefs-Broncos as their main late game, but that seems highly unlikely, especially if the Bengals win).

Basically, if the Jaguars win Jags-Steelers is probably the only real flex-out candidate (as long as the Titans win to make their game a plausible anchor game for the singleheader, or Fox is willing to send a good game to CBS to fill the same purpose, maybe even Rams-Cowboys); if the Colts, Rams, and Washington all win Rams-Cowboys is probably the favorite; and anything else could put the league in a heck of a spot, all before considering what the Bears and Chargers themselves do. (Frankly, if the Bears and Colts win and Rams lose, that might be enough for Bears-Chargers to keep its spot, and even the Colts result might not be needed.) Worth noting, though, that the consensus on the 506sports Discord seems to be that Washington’s game might be in just with a win over the Falcons regardless of what the Bears or Chargers do, that Fox would cling to Rams-Cowboys at all costs, that Browns-Seahawks might be the next best flex-in candidate, and that the Jaguars might be too low-wattage to ever be flexed in, Trevor Lawrence or no; I don’t think I agree with any of those things, but I did write these paragraphs when I wasn’t in the clearest headspace. Regardless, I’ll have my first Last-Minute Remarks in this new format coming on Monday before Cowboys-Chargers, at which point my thinking may have changed significantly.

Because of how short the tables are without Thursday and Monday nights, I decided to combine the remaining two weeks into a single image. Both of these weeks had started to attract attention for potential early flexes, though the Bengals finally looked like the team we’re used to seeing from them against the Cardinals. Coupled with no potential alternatives that don’t involve teams below .500 once protections come in, a win over the Seahawks might be enough for Bills-Bengals to be safe, and even a loss might not be fatal. Jets-Raiders is a more traditional “injured star player” early flex candidate, not helped by the Raiders not looking particularly impressive until their Monday night win over the Packers, and at least one and maybe even both of Niners-Jaguars and Browns-Ravens would be left unprotected – though flexing in a Fox game would result in more moving pieces to get Jets-Raiders on CBS.

I don’t have any firm positions on how Week 18 will work yet, other than a) it’ll still wait for Week 9 and b) the Playoff Picture will likely go back to appearing right before the Week 18 listing. I might continue to tweak this format as the season goes along – I’m already thinking of giving the whole table a border and not just the individual games – but I already like how this is working so far. But feel free to provide any feedback you might have, both now and as things progress.