NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

I talked about this last week, but the Cleveland Browns may well have given up on their season – and put the NFL in a very difficult spot in the process, one that could make a mockery of the goals driving flex scheduling.

Last season the Browns went 11-6 and made the playoffs, but did so largely on the back of Joe Flacco, now with the Colts, not their $230 million starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, who played respectably enough (getting the Browns out to a 6-3 start) but was injured in Week 10 against the Ravens and never returned. Despite the sexual assault allegations against Watson and the quarterback that actually led the Browns to the playoffs leaving town, the NFL saw fit to give the Browns four primetime appearances, though they at least put three of them during the flex period.

Well, this year, Watson has looked like a shadow of what he looked like in Houston, making his massive contract look like one of the biggest lemons in NFL history and spawning calls among fans to start backup Jameis Winston, and the Browns have only been able to muster one win all year. Last week they traded Amari Cooper, Watson’s best weapon, to the Bills, seemingly content to tank the season and figure out how to go forward next season – and that was before Watson tore his Achilles this past Sunday, ending his season (and it says a lot that both Browns fans and football fans more generally actually cheered his injury). You wouldn’t think the league would want to feature a team like that in marquee primetime windows if they could help it – yet they may be stuck with all three of the Browns’ games in flexible windows.

Start with Browns-Broncos on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a game I wasn’t sure was a good choice to schedule for Monday night in the main flex period but more because the Broncos weren’t expected to be good than the Browns. Thanksgiving weekend typically means a paucity of good games as the Sunday slate loses two more games than normal, including the high-value Cowboys, to the holiday, and now loses a third to Black Friday. Still, the Sunday slate does have multiple games that can be flexed in, with two CBS games involving teams with non-losing records: Eagles-Ravens as their lead doubleheader game, plus Chargers-Falcons. But the Chargers and Ravens are slated to play on Monday night the previous week in the “Harbowl”. The NFL never schedules teams to play in the same primetime window in consecutive weeks (the Thursday after Thanksgiving aside) and even when flex scheduling was limited to SNF only flexed teams into that situation very rarely and in exceptional circumstances; I certainly don’t think they’d be willing to do that for Monday night where there’s already a rest mismatch. Yet if the league doesn’t want to flex in either the Chargers or Ravens, Cardinals-Vikings might be their only option to so much as involve two teams at 3-4 or better.

What may be harder to replace is Browns-Bengals on Thursday night Week 16. The NFL has tried to prop up Thursday night as much as they can, allowing teams to play two short-week games and introducing Thursday night flex scheduling, but the rules surrounding the latter preclude most games from being moved to Thursday night, and Amazon may be stuck with the sort of underwhelming game that typified TNF in the pre-Amazon era.

The real problem, though, is Dolphins-Browns the following week on SNF. This is the week where five games get set aside for a possible move to NFL Network’s Saturday tripleheader, leaving relatively few games to be pre-scheduled for CBS and Fox’s Sunday slate, and enough of those games are divisional matchups where the first half of the rivalry isn’t being played on their respective conference’s regular network, inoculating them from needing to be protected, that there are a grand total of three games on the CBS and Fox slates that are eligible for a flex, meaning only one of them actually can be flexed in – and all three have been singularly disappointing. Any of the NFL Network games can be flexed in, as was the case with Trumps-Giants a few years ago, and the starts of Washington and Denver have been surprisingly strong enough to justify featuring them, but putting an NFL Network game on NBC means NFLN itself has to dig deeper into the Saturday-eligible pool to fill out the tripleheader, potentially putting a truly dire team on their air.

Last year we saw how the new guarantees CBS and Fox get could have such an effect as to overwhelm the expansion of flexing to Monday and Thursday nights and make any flex incredibly difficult. Now we’re seeing the consequences of it: games and teams that would seem to be shoo-ins for flexes, truly dire situations involving relatively low-wattage teams the league and networks wouldn’t want to feature, and they may be stuck with them.

(Note: If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, do not attempt to rephrase the comment and re-submit it. I’m still using an antispam plugin that’s supposed to require me to approve each commenter once before their comments will go up automatically, but in practice has required me to approve every single comment. I’ve made some changes to the active plugins in hopes that it’ll clear up any plugin conflict preventing it from working properly, but I may end up just ditching this plugin for another one.)

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

• Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
• Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
• Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
• CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Week 9 final schedule commentary (Week 6 post): Okay then! After what happened last year with Bears-Chargers I really was not expecting the league to flex out Jaguars-Eagles, certainly not once the Jags picked up a second win over the weekend over the lowly Patriots. A year after Mike North implicitly defended the Bears-Chargers non-flex by claiming that “no one’s out of it in Week 8”, the league not only made him look like a liar, but effectively declared that actually, the Jaguars really are out of it after Week 7, tagging them with the indignity of the first team to be the victim of an early flex solely for being bad, not because of an injury to a star player or a weird COVID situation. Bears-Chargers officially becomes one of the worst non-flexes in the history of the flex scheduling regime, possibly edging out Week 13 of 2020, which placed fifth on my list of Worst Flex Scheduling Decisions last year, for the absolute worst non-flex. I try to understand the bind the league was in then that didn’t apply to this year, where Bears-Chargers would have had to go to the late spot on CBS (depriving two big markets of CBS’ feature game) and Fox and CBS would have had to trade games back and forth to avoid CBS having too many late-window games, but I can’t shake the notion that in the past, or in the main flex period, the league would have considered whatever complicated back-and-forth flexing was required to be worth it. (Of course, being two big-market teams including probably the largest home-market fanbase in the league may well have been a bigger consideration, and difference from this year.)

It’s all the more remarkable when you consider that the game that was flexed in was Colts-Vikings, after the Vikings lost on Sunday and lost the undefeated factor. In retrospect my prediction that CBS would protect Bears-Cardinals over Broncos-Ravens was kind of silly, although as seen on Monday night, the Cardinals aren’t that terrible and could end up entering the game with a winning record. But I really did think the Colts were low-wattage enough that their game only had a chance of being flexed in if it had the undefeated Vikings factor. It underscores the notion that the league really was that desperate to get out of featuring the Jaguars on Sunday night that it was willing to bring in a game it might not normally flex in, reinvigorating the notion of “playing your way into primetime”, which in turn makes last year’s Bears-Chargers non-flex all the more mystifying. The question is whether that desperation will be enough as the season goes along. In the meantime, I guess I’m going back to covering potential early flexes regardless of the circumstances next year.

Week 11: I saw some speculation that flexing in Colts-Vikings was a potential prelude to flexing out Colts-Jets, but the problem there is that there aren’t a whole lot of options. The main problem is that we don’t know (or at least I don’t) whether there’s a hard minimum of seven games CBS has to air of every AFC team. If there isn’t, and the Bengals continue to improve to the level we’re used to seeing from them while the Chargers remain respectable, the league might just end up being bailed out, but if there is then neither game even needs to be protected as the Chiefs and Bengals are both sitting on seven CBS games. Even if only the Chiefs are subject to a seven-game minimum (after Fox was reported to have an eight-game Cowboys minimum last year) that just means CBS would protect Bengals-Chargers.

The other question is whether Fox needs to protect Packers-Bears with the other half of the rivalry falling in Week 18, and it’s entirely possible that even if it’s not officially flex-immune, it’s enough so that Fox would feel comfortable protecting Falcons-Broncos instead. Week 18 tends to be a weird exception to the normal schedule rules, almost a precursor to the playoffs more than a part of the regular season, with no tentatives, protections, or appearance limits involved, and last year the league saw fit to give Texans-Colts to ESPN when Colts-Texans had aired on Fox instead of CBS so it’s possible those same exceptions apply to Week 18. But I thought it was significant that the only Week 18 games that weren’t rematches of games on the proper conference’s network instead had their first halves air on the other conference’s network, not any of the primetime packages, and this year all Week 18 games have their first halves on the proper conference’s network, so it may well be that even if the league doesn’t have to, it’ll at least try to honor the networks’ guarantees for half of each division rivalry for the Week 18 games. It’s entirely possible that that commitment is strong enough that Fox can protect Falcons-Broncos and not worry about the league taking away Packers-Bears, or at least dare them to do so. (And for the record, it’s very possible at the moment for the Week 18 matchup to be for a wild card spot.)

Week 12: The options this week are pretty slim with a number of good teams on bye and a number of Sunday afternoon divisional matchups where the return match is either on the wrong network or in Week 18. The current feature games look decidedly mediocre, but three of the Rams’ four losses have come against the loaded NFC North, so they may well be better than their record currently implies despite the trade rumors swirling around them. (Unfortunately, they complete their tour of the NFC North with the Vikings this week followed by venturing into the lions’ den of Lumen Field.) Ravens-Chargers, meanwhile, I doubt ESPN would move away from even if both teams were winless. Lions-Colts looks better in terms of records than any of the feature games, but I’m not sure it has the star power to justify a flex.

Week 13: I thought Browns-Broncos was a questionable choice to schedule for Monday night in the main flex period, but I doubt very many people predicted that it would be the Browns, not the Broncos, dragging it down. But many of the best teams are off the table due to Thanksgiving, and some of the teams I expected to produce viable Fox games have underperformed as well, leaving the best option on the table a Chargers-Falcons game the league would likely be very reticent to flex in and give the Chargers consecutive Monday night games. CBS protecting Chargers-Falcons and letting ESPN have Eagles-Ravens isn’t a solution even if CBS were up for it, because the Ravens are the other half of that Monday night game the previous week. Would the league flex in Cardinals-Vikings even if the Cardinals are below .500? Would Fox protect Seahawks-Jets over Cardinals-Vikings despite the Jets’ sluggish record as a rare opportunity to feature Aaron Rodgers? Those questions might already be starting to be discussed.

Week 14: Even if the Bengals continue to struggle as the season continues, it would still take highly exceptional circumstances for the Cowboys to be flexed out. Falcons-Vikings looks like an intriguing flex option at the moment, as I suspect Fox would still protect Bears-Niners given the size of the markets and the prospect of the Niners improving once Christian McCaffrey comes back, but it’s not going to overcome “Cowboys uber alles”, certainly not when the Falcons are only a game better than the Bengals.

Week 15: I mentioned earlier that the Rams may be better than their record suggests, but if they’re 3-6 when the decision has to be made (as is very possible), that may not overcome the league’s desire to have a test case for Thursday night flexing, and while there’s only one TNF-eligible game on the whole week’s slate, it’s the only unprotected game involving two teams over .500. Remember that TNF flexing was (officially) instituted as a two-year pilot program, so the league may be especially motivated to get a test of it out of the way. (This also assumes CBS can’t protect Colts-Broncos without relinquishing their ability to protect Bills-Lions, so if the Raiders manage to remain respectable enough to lower the risk of their game being flexed out, that may take the Thursday night flex off the table again. But it’s also worth noting that there’s some doubt over the one-road-short-week-game rule, which would open up the possibility of both Bucs-Chargers and Sinners-Saints being TNF-eligible as well, though Fox may protect one of them and the Saints don’t exactly look like flex-in material at the moment.)

Week 16: The league’s opportunity for a TNF flex might have come this week, but Jaguars-Raiders is the only TNF-eligible game not involving a one-win team. (Eagles-Swing States is technically TNF-eligible, but the first matchup between them is already scheduled for TNF.) For that matter, a weak Monday night game between the Saints and Packers may find its best alternative to be a rather uninspiring Broncos-Chargers contest, assuming Fox protects Vikings-Seahawks. Then there’s the notion that CBS might decide they want out of Niners-Dolphins as their feature game, but having no games on their slate with no teams at two or fewer wins.

Week 17: Washington’s blazing start has seemingly made their game against the Falcons a near-lock to anchor the NFL Network Saturday tripleheader, but if the Bengals start looking more like what we’ve come to expect from them, Broncos-Bengals could be an alternate anchor if the league decides to sacrifice Falcons-Voters to save NBC from having to show the Browns, and even Cardinals-Rams could prove to be better than their records suggest at the moment. Still, sending a Saturday game to NBC could leave NFL Network needing to air a game involving a team only a game better than the Browns at best. The problem is that only three games on the Fox and CBS slates aren’t divisional rematches of games on the wrong network, and the only one of those games not involving a one-win team is the only one of the three scheduled for Fox (that is, the only one they need to protect). It’s possible the Browns could turn things around with Winston or Dorian Thompson-Robinson at quarterback, but if not, the league is going to have some tough decisions to make – and the Dolphins getting out to a slow start of their own doesn’t help.

Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.