NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

We’ve reached an odd point in the season: on paper there’s a decently clear divide between the good or at least mediocre teams and the bad ones, and there are enough bad teams, and feisty ones among them, that they can beat up on each other and catch some teams on a bad day and form an amorphous mass with no clear separation. There are a whopping eight teams with two wins, seven of them at 2-6, but only two, the Titans and Panthers, with only one win and three teams at three wins.

Not all of these teams are created equal; the Dolphins, our one 2-5 team, lost Tua Tagovailoa for much of the season to this point to yet another concussion, while the Browns just stunned the Ravens in their first game with Jameis Winston at quarterback, suggesting losing their $230 million signal-caller could prove to be the best thing to happen to their season. The same could be said for the three-win teams; the Cowboys may be entering a season from hell, while the Rams seem to have suffered nothing worse than “going through the entirety of the best division in football in their first seven games” and picked up a win over the previously-5-1 Vikings at the end of it. With the Bengals, on the other hand, it’s not clear which is the case; it had looked like they might have righted the ship, but then they suffered a blowout loss to the Eagles that had previously seemed to be in their own disarray.

I bring all this up because it makes putting together the graphics on this post difficult if there aren’t four games outside the featured windows involving only teams with three or more wins. For this post I’ve largely emphasized the divisions with the weakest leaders, the NFC South and West, where the teams below .500 are closer to the playoffs than other teams that might seem to have achieved similar levels of success (or lack thereof). That mostly means the Saints, but I’ve also tried to put some spotlight on the Browns in case they go on a run with Winston (certainly the networks airing their featured-window games I mentioned last week hope so).

(As an aside, it’s odd that WordPress’ block editor involves making images completely separate blocks from the surrounding paragraphs, yet images that are aligned to the side no longer force those paragraphs below them on mobile, even if there isn’t enough space for even a single word when it tries to wrap the text around the image. I’ve converted the bulk of the rest of the post to use the classic editor to attempt to get around this, but it’s clunky and doesn’t seem to work well if I save the post as a draft and attempt to come back to it later.)

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 11: After the Jets did what not even the Jaguars could and lost to the lowly Patriots, there seems to be a general sense that Colts-Jets is a game that needs to be flexed out, but it’s not clear that it can – and if it isn’t, Jimmy Fallon may be at least partially to blame.

Two points of ambiguity in the flex rules (in terms of what’s known to the public, not any sort of ambiguity held by the networks or the league) are critical to determining what will happen here. First, whether Bears-Packers falling in Week 18 means that Fox doesn’t have to protect Packers-Bears, and can protect 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.)

The other question is whether there’s a hard minimum of seven appearances that each AFC team, or even just the Chiefs, has to have on CBS. Heading into last season all that was known about how the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” associations were being preserved despite all games technically becoming “free agents” was that each network could request a certain number of games involving a certain number of teams – the exact number of either wasn’t known, but during the season it was reported that Fox had a hard minimum of eight Cowboys games. As such, I was stunned to find CBS only getting seven Chiefs games on this year’s schedule, and wasn’t sure what other AFC team CBS even could have requested eight games for.

In each of the two years of the new contract, each of the Sunday afternoon networks has gotten no fewer than seven games of each team from their respective conference. It’s possible that’s a hard minimum that can’t be breached by flexing a game into a primetime package, but I haven’t seen any firm reporting to that effect, and it would be odd for such a big deal to be made about those requested minimums if they’re only one game higher than what the networks would get anyway. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the reason the minimum number of games CBS and Fox could request wasn’t reported was that it was variable and they could request as few as seven games if they wanted – although I’m not sure why they wouldn’t request as many games as they could. In that case, CBS may well have requested a minimum of seven Chiefs games and doesn’t have to protect Chiefs-Bills, allowing them to use that protection on Bengals-Chargers.

In any event, it’s not clear Bengals-Chargers would be worth flexing in even if the league could. The Bengals had shown flashes of the team we’re used to seeing from them in the Burrow era in recent weeks, but after a rather lackluster defeat at the hands of an Eagles team that might be worse than their record, their three wins have come against the one-win Panthers, two-win Giants, and a Browns team that went from Watson to Thompson-Robinson during the game, raising the prospect that the Bengals are, at best, the best of the bad teams. Even a win against the Raiders this week – another weak team for them to beat up on – would only get them to 4-5, and the league would be very reticent to flex in a team below .500; on the off chance the Bengals lose and Jets win, the two teams would have the exact same record, and the league definitely wouldn’t flex out the Jets for the Bengals then.

If worst come to worst, I saw some speculation on the 506sports Discord that Fox may elect to waive its right to air both halves of a division rivalry and allow NBC to get Seahawks-Niners. That could theoretically apply to any of the restrictions, but Fox wouldn’t want to give up Packers-Bears and CBS wouldn’t want to give up Ravens-Steelers. Bengals-Chargers would be an option for CBS to give up, which would get more eyeballs on the featured game, but I’m not sure they’d want to give up Burrow vs. Herbert/Harbaugh even as an undercard, and Seahawks-Niners is currently trapped on the late singleheader, something the league has in the past indicated they’d prefer not to have marquee games in. Fox could decide they’re fine going without Seahawks-Niners this year, but if the game has value to NBC it has value to Fox (and similarly, if it doesn’t have value to Fox it’s not clear how much value it has to NBC), it’s not like they’re the sort of worldbeaters that demand to be released from the late singleheader, and given the choice I think Fox would rather have Seahawks-Niners than Falcons-Broncos, so if it got to that point I think a more likely outcome would be the NFL pulling a “protection override” or otherwise convincing Fox not to protect Falcons-Broncos.

Moreover, I’m not convinced the situation with the Jets is even so dire as to justify using any means necessary to get out of the game in the first place. The Jets may be in a tailspin, but the power of the Aaron Rodgers factor can’t be underestimated. NBC may have tipped its hand as to what it would prefer a couple of weeks ago when it announced a special edition of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to air after the game, and according to Variety, the plan is for Fallon to head out to MetLife Stadium to promote the episode after taping it – something that obviously would be far easier to do with the game in the show’s backyard than it would if it was in Denver or Los Angeles (even Philadelphia might be too much of a trip). The idea that the ability to promote The Tonight Show might be the determining factor that leads NBC to keep the game sounds like something a certain commenter of mine might propose, but the reality may be more the other way around: NBC thinks the Jets with Rodgers are so attractive, even if they’re in a tailspin, that their willingness to set this up at a time that they were already struggling is what points to them wanting to keep the game regardless of what the Jets’ record is. But the league may not necessarily agree.

The Jets play host to the Texans, probably in the second tier of teams in the league, on Thursday night, and on Wednesday morning were actually slight favorites. Beat the Texans, and the prospect of the Jets having righted the ship would be compelling enough that, at the very least, the league wouldn’t consider it worth bending their rules to get out of Colts-Jets. If the Jets lose, especially if they lose badly, that’s another matter, but even then if they can’t convince Fox to let them have Falcons-Broncos I’m not sure they have any options that are that much better unless the Bengals beat the Raiders. Throw in NBC probably preferring to stick with Colts-Jets and I think the game has a better-than-even chance of keeping its spot. With the below scenario I’m assuming that the league would want to bail out of a Jets team in a tailspin if they can even if NBC wants otherwise, but I wouldn’t rule out Colts-Jets keeping its spot no matter what happens.

Final prediction:

• No changes (if the Jets win).
• If the Jets lose:
  • Atlanta Falcons @ Denver Broncos to SNF (if Fox has to protect Packers-Bears and/or can be convinced not to protect Falcons-Broncos).
  • Cincinnati Bengals @ Los Angeles Chargers to SNF (if Fox protects Falcons-Broncos, CBS has to protect Chiefs-Bills, and the Bengals win).
  • No changes (if both of the above games are protected, or if Falcons-Broncos is protected and the Bengals lose).

Week 12: NBC may be breathing a sigh of relief if it turns out the Rams are better than their record – good enough to score an upset win over the Vikings, even if it was at home. 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 besides the Rams the Niners and Chargers also picked up wins this week, meaning none of the games really look like they need to be flexed out, and while Lions-Colts is good enough in terms of records to justify being flexed in, I don’t think it has the star power for it.

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? The league and ESPN are really hoping the Browns’ win over the Ravens is the start of them going on a late-season run.

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: If the Rams are good enough to beat the Vikings, even at home, the league’s opportunity to get their test case for TNF flexing may be slipping away. It seemed to set up so well: the Rams and Niners were both struggling to start the season, and while there was only one TNF-eligible game on the Sunday slate, that game was likely to be the only unprotected game on the Sunday slate involving two teams at or above .500 (I expect Fox to protect Bucs-Chargers unless they think they might lose Steelers-Eagles to SNF if they don’t protect it, which is unlikely at the moment; a move to Monday with the Steelers playing the following Saturday seems highly unlikely). Now the league may turn its attention to potentially flexing Colts-Broncos the other way, to Monday night, to get away from a weak Falcons-Raiders contest – but how much does ESPN even care about the ESPN halves of these Monday night “doubleheaders”?

Week 16: The league’s opportunity for a TNF flex might have come this week, but the only TNF-eligible games all involve one- or two-win teams. (Eagles-Swing States is technically TNF-eligible, but the first matchup between them is already scheduled for TNF.) Meanwhile, it’s looking increasingly likely, even as the Niners’ prospects improve, that CBS wants out of Niners-Dolphins as their feature game, but not having any compelling alternatives short of a crossflex – and whichever game between Broncos-Chargers and Vikings-Seahawks Fox doesn’t protect is probably already heading to Monday night if the Saints continue to struggle. Could Fox be willing to give up both games with the two strong divisional matchups anchoring their singleheader slate that don’t need to be protected, perhaps preferring to keep Giants-Falcons? Could CBS decide to feature Rams-Jets even if the Jets don’t win another game until then, banking on the Aaron Rodgers factor? We’ll see.

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 the prospect of being sacrificed to save NBC from having to show a lackluster Dolphins-Browns game remains – even if the Browns go on a run with Winston, the game would need the Dolphins to improve as well. But Cardinals-Rams now looks like a better alternate anchor than Broncos-Bengals, and sacrificing a game to NBC means NFL Network would be stuck airing a game involving a team with the same 2-6 record as the Browns. 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 (even now!) is the only one of the three scheduled for Fox (that is, the only one they need to protect). It’s looking increasingly likely that the league is going to have some tough decisions to make.

Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.