NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 11

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of any of the Thanksgiving or Black Friday games, or the first half of the early Sunday games.

There’s a good reason for my lateness this week: NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning Mike North made the rounds with appearances on a pair of relatively prominent national podcasts on Tuesday, taking interviews on both the Peter King Podcast and Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Podcast with some revealing tidbits about the NFL’s thinking with regards to flex scheduling… but I’m not sure how thankful I am of them. I’m going to take the unusual step of putting my thoughts after the jump, which also will mean after the breakdown of the flex schedule rules.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are 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; 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 but their Peacock game that night does. 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.

One curiosity was that North told King that the two-short-week-game rule was not created with the TNF flex in mind, but rather the Black Friday game, with North explicitly stating that before, teams were limited to one short-week game that included both Sunday-to-Thursday and Sunday-to-Friday gaps. I’m not sure I believe that. Recall that last year the Cowboys and Titans technically played two short-week games, by playing the week after Christmas on TNF when the Sunday slate the previous week had been punted to Saturday to get out of the way of the holiday, creating a Saturday-to-Thursday gap the same length as a Sunday-to-Friday gap would be. Now of course it’s entirely possible that this was a mutually-agreed upon exception to the rules with the second short-week game coming after a Saturday slate as an ad-hoc form of mitigation, but pretty much all reporting at the time that the two-short-week rule was passed indicated that it spun out of discussion of the TNF flex and I even seem to vaguely recall North himself talking about it as a way to get Amazon better games. (That being said, regardless of whether the Black Friday game counted towards it, giving Amazon games in every non-Thanksgiving week from weeks 2 to 17 would still have required loosening the one-game-per-team rule as there would still be 17 short-week games with the Thanksgiving games, and there aren’t Sunday-style slates on Saturday every year.) If Dolphins-Jets does count as a short-week game though, that would give the Jets two short-week games and the Dolphins a road short-week game, none of which would have affected any other game’s prospects; even the Week 14 Texans-Jets game would have made the Jets’ game with the Browns the following week not a short-week game, as I noted at the time.

On the topic of the lack of early flexes despite some questionable games, North didn’t quite say what I surmised back when Bears-Chargers wasn’t flexed out, that the league sees the early flex as a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option only to be used for injuries to star players that send teams into the tank. What he said to King was, “It’s hard to tell any team that, you know, you’re no longer relevant, that you’re not playing for anything in Week 8. It was only last year, right, that Detroit was out to a 1-6 start, went into the final week of the season playing for a playoff spot, so nobody’s out of it, in our minds, in Week 8.” (North similarly told Traina that “it’s hard to say anybody’s season is over in Week 8, 9, 10.”) The obvious question that would raise is why the early flex exists at all if “nobody’s out of it in Week 8”, and I think my earlier comments about injuries to star players answer that question, but there’s also the question of how meaningful it is that “nobody’s out of it” if a team is 1-5 at the time the decision has to be made. Late-season rallies like what the Lions did last year can happen, but they aren’t exactly common and the audience has no way of knowing they’re going to happen if you keep a game on the schedule that would be, at best, near the start of the rally. I’ll get to the potential answer to that question a little later.

(North also said, as part of the same discussion, that “the bar for flex…maybe is a little bit higher than we’re used to. I think that’s due in part to the fact that, you know, we’ve got multiple partners now for flexible scheduling, so it’s not just about solely what’s best for Sunday night, it’s about what’s the right way to dole out these appearances for all of our teams across Sunday night, Monday night, and Thursday night…” It’s certainly the case that a game that might have been flexed out in the past might instead keep its spot if one of the other primetime packages has a game that’s even worse, but considering the lack of any flexes for any of the primetime packages to this point, I think having CBS and Fox guaranteed one half of each division rivalry has more to do with it.)

Before we get to that answer, though, this raises some questions about how the league puts the schedule together to begin with. When King asked North about the Bengals and Joe Burrow’s injury, North provided some insight into how the league approaches scheduling its feature games when the schedule comes out in May: “Which of these games do you deploy early in the season because you’re worried that they might not hold up if you save them for too late? And which of these games do you feel pretty good about saving for December when you’ve got to figure these teams are going to be playing for something?” Personally, I’ve generally been of the view that it should be the other way around: games that “might not hold up” can be flexed out if you do “save them for too late”, while if you’re not going to flex out games in October barring injuries to star players, games where you “feel pretty good” about the teams “playing for something” are probably the best ones to schedule for that time of year, not December, since the early flex gives you protection against Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers getting injured and producing the only circumstance that would make the game not worth watching.

Bears-Chargers and Vikings-Broncos were defensible games to schedule for primetime games, but non-playoff teams with weak records in the previous season were risky plays to schedule for October in the early flex period. You could put them in November or December when you can flex them out; you could put them in September, before people might have gotten much of a sense of how good or bad the teams are outside a handful of games; but October is too late to avoid the judgment that certain teams stink but too early to flex them out. (Jets-Raiders, and the rest of the Raiders’ inexplicably large primetime slate, was always indefensible.) October may be too early for any team to be out of the playoffs, but it isn’t too early for the general public to write them off, and it seems like this creates a blind spot in the way the league office thinks about the schedule.

But it’s evident that the league doesn’t think the way I would if I were running it, and perhaps, neither do the networks. The league doesn’t go into the scheduling process thinking that they can put marginal games in the main flex period because they can just be flexed out if they disappoint; they assume that every game will be played as originally scheduled, and flexible scheduling is just to provide a backstop in case they get it wrong. With that in mind, the networks probably want to get their best matchups in November, the only month within the NFL’s regular season that’s a sweeps month, and it’s probably not a coincidence that the big Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl rematch was played this past week. The networks probably also appreciate getting good games in September and December, when their entertainment programming is often on break. From that perspective, it makes sense that October would be the weakest stretch of the season; I just don’t know that it needed to be as weak as it was this year. On top of that, someone on the 506sports Discord suggested that the league might not want to risk a team suffering the humiliation of being flexed out multiple times, which is fair enough but has its limits.

But let’s go back to the notion that “nobody’s out of it” even at 1-5 in October, since that’s really the crux of the disconnect here. North said this to Traina:

The object of flexible scheduling is never about getting the best game into primetime. It’s about getting out of a game that has fallen short of expectations, the crystal ball in May wasn’t clear, and now both teams are eliminated from playoff contention…if we’ve got a game in primetime that has clearly no longer got playoff implications, and there’s a game on Sunday afternoon on CBS or Fox that isn’t their very best game, so we’re not gutting them completely, that’s where you’ll see a flex along the way somewhere here I’m sure, where you get a team that has played their way into national attention, maybe like a Houston, and then you’ll find those guys kinda moving into a national window. Hard to say at 8, 9, or 10 that anybody’s season is over, as you get later in the year, we’re looking for games with playoff implications in every window, that’s probably where you’ll see us make a move if we make one.

North used stronger language with King, saying that “the game really needs to no longer have playoff implications. ‘Not as compelling as we thought’ isn’t a reason to get out of it, but ‘no longer relevant’, maybe that’s a reason to get out of it.” On Monday, Rob Tornoe had a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer that similarly quoted North as saying “It’s not about getting into a better game. It’s about getting out a game that no longer has playoff implication,” and indicated that flexing out Chiefs-Patriots for Eagles-Seahawks, which I’ve been considering as almost as sure a thing as there is in flexing this season, is “unlikely”. But when Traina brought up the Patriots’ primetime games in Weeks 14-16 and initially assumed “Chiefs you’re not flexing out”, North wasn’t quite so willing to commit, and seemed to backtrack on the importance of playoff implications in the process:

In a vacuum, it would be surprising if ESPN would ask the NFL “hey, we only get two Chiefs games, and you know, Super Bowl champs, and you know, league MVP Patrick Mahomes, we’d like to trade that one back.” That’s unlikely, but then you go look at the Sunday afternoon window and you’re wondering, are there games, or a game, that might be a little underdistributed, that isn’t going to completely ruin CBS or Fox’s afternoon if we took that one, and then to our point from before, you’re returning a Kansas City game to whomever is going to lose the game to primetime, it’s going to be a very different calculus for CBS and Fox knowing “oh, I might lose this, but I’ll get back Patrick Mahomes?” It may not hurt as much to flex one of their games to primetime on Monday night that week, so it all goes into it…and we make our best guess as to how competitive we think that game’s going to be if it stays in primetime and what the viewership might be.

Based on that, Traina reached the conclusion that Chiefs-Patriots was one of the two games most likely to be flexed out in the last few weeks of the season, and I’m inclined to side with him because the alternative, taking North completely seriously that playoff implications are the only factor that goes into whether or not to flex a game out, doesn’t quite align with how the league has used the flex in the past, nor does it entirely make sense. Just last year, all three flexed-out games in Weeks 14, 15, and 17 involved teams that were at least in the playoff hunt, with one of them being a Chiefs-Broncos game in a similar situation to Chiefs-Patriots this year (and demonstrating how willing the league is to flex out of the Chiefs if circumstances warrant), and another, a Rams-Chargers game that was effectively forced into being flexed out at a time the Chargers were on the outside looking in on the playoff picture, inexplicably being replaced by a Steelers-Ravens game at risk of having less playoff implications, both compared to the game it was flexed in for and compared to the other games that could have been flexed in. (And, of course, if playoff implications were so important the league wouldn’t have made the Week 18 decisions it made either.)

But hey, maybe this newfound emphasis on playoff implications is something new with the new contracts. But do we really think ESPN is perfectly fine with Titans-Dolphins, a lopsided game pitting two teams with limited name value, compared to any of the other games that could be flexed in for it, because it has playoff implications for the Dolphins? To take it to an extreme, if Saints-Panthers were scheduled for a primetime window, would the league stick with it because the Saints are fighting for the NFC South, even if the Game of the Century is trapped in the late singleheader? I have a hard time accepting that, yet even the way North describes a potential Chiefs-Patriots flex suggests it’s only on the table because of the value it would bring to Fox, which in my mind would normally mitigate against flexing such a game out.

Frankly this not only makes me a lot more understanding of the league’s approach to scheduling the last month of the season, it makes me think they don’t take it far enough. If you went to a sportsbook right before the schedule came out and placed a bet on how the Chiefs and Patriots did this season, the Chiefs would be tied for the highest win total at 11.5 and would have the best Super Bowl odds, while the Patriots would have a win total of 7.5, below .500 and outside the top 20 teams in the league. The prospect always existed for this game to be horrifically lopsided and to potentially not “hold up if you save it for too late”, to have playoff implications for the Chiefs while the Patriots were already reduced to playing out the string. (For that matter, Eagles-Seahawks always looked like a potentially better game with the Eagles having a total of 10.5 to Seattle’s 8.5. Titans-Dolphins would have been only marginally better, with the Titans having the same 7.5 total while the Dolphins sat at 9.5.) If you must put a team expected to go 7-10 or 8-9 in primetime in December, at least pit them against a team with a similar win total so the teams are relatively equally likely to flop and become flex-out material, and if it isn’t flexed out the game should at least be competitive if not cleanly played.

If this holds up in the league’s flexing decisions the rest of the way, it suggests that the Buzzmeter should be calibrated to the better team and how close they are to the nearest team that can affect their playoff position or presence, at least for games currently in featured windows, if I keep it in its current form at all, and coupled with the implication last week that protections aren’t due until the point where the flex is, it might suggest pushing the start of the Flex Schedule Watch to Week 8. But frankly, if the league is really willing to keep bad games just because they have playoff implications, even at the expense of other games with more playoff implications, that might make me throw up my hands and give up on the Watch entirely. I’d like to think North’s comments on Chiefs-Patriots are closer to how the league is actually thinking and North is just doing damage control in advance of potential future non-flexes that might be head-scratching to the layman, but the whole situation has me on edge.

In any case, if we look at flexing from the perspective of whether or not both teams are out of the playoff hunt, then the only truly problematic game would be Packers-Giants as part of the Week 14 Monday night “doubleheader”, the only game both Tornoe and Traina took away as being at risk of being flexed out. In years past I’d have expected that game to keep its spot unless the game was truly dire and Texans-Jets, the only game that could be flexed in for it, was the Game of the Century, but according to North such a flex has been under serious consideration:

A week ago, I would have told you ‘yeah, certainly a possibility we might flip those two’; now, of course, Green Bay and the Giants both get Ws, Houston is still worthy of some additional national exposure, the Jets have some still…there was definitely a conversation, still to be a conversation about, should we flip the Giants and the Jets games on Monday night of Week 14? We’re gonna do a Monday night flex someday, it’s gonna happen, I’m not sure doing it in Week 14 into a side-by-side where we, you know, I’m not sure we recognize the true value of it, plus you’d be flexing into a Houston-Jets, same window as Tennessee-Miami, you’ve already got the AFC South, AFC East, you know, interests kind of covered, I’m not sure we do it, but the Texans have played their way into national television, we’re looking for an opportunity to [inaudible]…

Look, a week ago, I would have agreed with you [about featuring C.J. Stroud], now, given what Green Bay did last [Sunday], they’re going to be playing on Thanksgiving in Detroit, Detroit had their hands full with Chicago, what if Green Bay is on a bit of a winning streak, the Giants just won a game, who knows if Packers-Giants isn’t the game that maybe projects to do a little bit better, for Disney, for ESPN or ABC depending on where that game is played? The Texans have played their way into national television, there’s no question about it. We’ll find ways for our fans to see C.J. Stroud more between now and the end of the season and it may not be that Monday night.

Week 14: Before these interviews, if you had asked me which of the week’s Monday night games was more vulnerable I absolutely would have picked Titans-Dolphins. The Giants are slightly worse than the Titans while the Packers entered the week at 4-6, but the Giants and Packers bring a lot more name value and Titans-Dolphins looks to be decidedly lopsided, plus, of course, there are a lot more options to flex in for Titans-Dolphins and the Jets at 4-6 aren’t a particularly inspiring choice for a flex. As of the Week 10 post, the period North referenced as being when they were strongly considering swapping the New York teams, Titans-Dolphins was 3-6 v. 6-3, Packers-Giants was 3-6 v. 2-8, and Texans-Jets was a respectable 5-4 v. 4-5 – a clear step up over Packers-Giants, to be sure, and that’s a pair of records for the Packers-Giants game that sure doesn’t look good, but going from two bad teams to two mediocre teams doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d normally expect out of a flex, and my philosophy would normally be that if a flex was on the table it would depend more on the Giants as the worse team than the Packers as Traina and North seemed to suggest. But if the determining factor is whether the game has playoff implications for one team, the Packers are closer to that status.

In years past (and if I’d managed to get this post out at least before Black Friday), I’d be looking at the potential for the Giants to fall to 3-9 and the Jets to climb to 5-6 and potentially within striking distance of the playoffs and suggest in that circumstance that the Giants are too much of a tire fire to justify keeping around, but in the inverse circumstance, where the Giants climb to 4-8 and the Jets are only a half-game better at 4-7, I’d be saying that’s not enough of an improvement to justify a flex, especially considering the Texans’ lack of name value compared to the Packers and Giants. The Packers’ record, especially compared to the Texans, wouldn’t be entirely irrelevant to the discussion, but depending on how things shook out it might be better for the Packers to be worse and keep things competitive. As it stands the Packers’ upset win on Thanksgiving is probably good for Packers-Giants’ chances to keep its spot either way. As for Titans-Dolphins, the only reason I’m not predicting it to be flexed out for Jags-Browns is to see how CBS’ early window holds up without it. The Bengals winning would be a big help, as would not swapping the New York teams’ games. But if I end up predicting a flex, and especially if the Titans lose to the lowly Panthers, this would become a big early test of where the league’s priorities lie.

(And by the way, after implying that the league would keep games involving truly bad teams if the other team was so much as in the playoff hunt, North has a lot of gall using that “play your way into primetime” phrasing to describe the Texans. If the league’s flex decisions the rest of the year hold to their emphasis on playoff implications, they should straight-up retire that phrasing, because North just explicitly said that’s not what flex scheduling is about.)

Week 15: While I fully understand the perspective of anyone who’d be surprised at the Chiefs being flexed out under any circumstances and even the Patriots to a lesser extent, and even Traina and North’s comments seem to be sufficiently hedged that they aren’t necessarily saying more than that a flex is a possibility, I’m still expecting Chiefs-Patriots to be flexed out for Eagles-Seahawks if things continue as they have been. It’s too good a fit for how the league has used the flex in the past, and refraining from a flex in this situation would be bad enough to make my list of worst flex decisions if Chiefs-Patriots were the Sunday night tentative in years past. With regards to NFL Network’s Saturday tripleheader, the emphasis on playoff implications could suggest that the record of the better team is more important than that of the worse team when determining which games get picked, and that could suggest Bears-Browns has a better chance of sneaking into the lineup than you might think if the Bengals stumble too much without Burrow.

Week 17: In his column on Monday King actually suggested that Bengals-Chiefs in the late doubleheader could be swapped out for Dolphins-Ravens if the Bengals go into the tank without Burrow – something that might not be entirely consistent with the emphasis on having playoff implications for one team, but North did imply to Traina that it was on the table. That makes a potential Packers-Vikings flex somewhat less likely as Dolphins-Ravens was always a leading candidate for that, but it already seemed more likely that Fox would leave Steelers-Seahawks unprotected in favor of Niners-Commies or Saints-Bucs, since it’ll be pinned to the late singleheader with limited distribution. Speaking of Saints-Bucs, that game could have significant playoff implications if that outweighs the ease of scheduling Falcons-Saints. With the Jets turning into a comedy of errors, we could get a demonstration of why I thought protections had to come in at least five weeks in advance, especially since Saints-Bucs might not realistically be movable to Thursday since its eligibility depends on being able to give the Saints a full week off when the Bucs wouldn’t – as well as a test of how much playoff implications truly matter to the league, since the Browns are still very much in the playoff hunt. Worth repeating: after the two games indicated in the graphic, the third of three TNF-eligible games this week is Chargers-Broncos, currently trapped behind Bengals-Chiefs and not necessarily in line to move up to the lead game.

Week 18: Cowboys-Sheriffs, Bucs-Panthers, and Texans-Colts are all rematches of games currently scheduled for the wrong conference’s network. This chart still suggests the NFC South games and Vikings-Lions are the main Sunday night contenders from the NFC, but that may change next week. The AFC is more chaotic; the AFC North games are obviously contenders, as are Texans-Colts and Bills-Dolphins, with Broncos-Raiders and Jaguars-Titans having outside shots. Already, before the Thanksgiving games, Cowboys-Sheriffs started to look like a long shot even for an ESPN window as Washington fades. (Something to keep an eye on: Tornoe seemingly indicated that Week 18 is subject to appearance limits again now.)