NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

Underscoring my continued struggles with finding something to put in the opening section, I had this mostly written on Tuesday, and even had an idea for what to put here, but I’m not writing the opening section until early Friday morning. Not helping matters is that the thing I was going to put here had to do with my screwing up multiple times when putting together this week’s graphics; forgetting that I intended to extend one of the weekly graphics down a row, so you’ll see me talk about the prospect of flexing a game that’s not on the graphic to TNF, and updating the wild card standings for the result of the Dolphins-Rams game but not the division standings, so those aren’t accurate. I actually re-did the Week 17 graphic because I’d forgotten that I’ve only done one row of the Sunday options that week, and the games I’ve been storing in the second row aren’t necessarily the games I would feature in a proper post including that row.

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 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 Chargers-Falcons the best option on the table. I originally thought the league might be reticent to give the Chargers consecutive Monday night games (and potentially four straight primetime games more generally!), but it’s not as bad a situation as if they were being flexed in the week before an existing Monday night game, which would create a rest mismatch that didn’t previously exist. Instead, this will have the effect of alleviating the existing rest mismatch by at least giving the Chargers a full week off.

According to Broncos beat writer Chris Tomasson, the Broncos should know by Monday if their game is being flexed out, with an acknowledgement of the Chargers and Bengals having consecutive Monday night games if their respective games are flexed in being an obstacle to those games being picked (but no mention of the Bengals-Steelers rematch falling in Week 18). According to him, Cardinals-Vikings is “a possibility”, and I suppose it’s still possible Fox would prefer to hold on to Seahawks-Jets for the Aaron Rodgers factor and getting a piece of the New York market, but I’m going to stick with what I wrote for my prediction earlier in the week. (Also worth noting that Tomasson says, in a tweet that was submitted right before the start of the Thursday night game, that CBS is “expected to freeze” Eagles-Ravens, which might as well be saying protections aren’t due until right at the point the decision has to be made.) Final prediction: Los Angeles Chargers @ Atlanta Falcons to MNF.

Week 14: When the schedule was announced I had marked Bears-Niners as Fox’s lead doubleheader game in this week. It made sense: marquee teams in big markets with big fanbases and a chance to look at Caleb Williams, while Bills-Rams, despite Josh Allen’s star power and the nominal size of the Rams’ market, involved a small-market team playing a team struggling to make inroads in the market (though not nearly as much as the Chargers) with little to no buzz entering the season despite the same expected record as the Bears. But no: it was Bills-Rams that Fox promoted as their lead game when the schedule came out, proving once again what happens when you assume.

That shifts the calculus regarding what Fox wants to do with its games in ways that I think underscore why I’d marked the games as I did. With Bears-Niners as its lead game Fox would want to hold on to that unless the Bears were completely non-viable, whereas I would think Fox would be more willing to give up Bills-Rams, all things considered. Were it not for Fox’s early window consisting of Falcons-Vikings and absolutely nothing else, I would still think Fox would want to protect Bears-Niners.

When I wrote this post last week I’d forgotten that ESPN had announced its “Simpsons Funday Football” game for this week, which would be awkward to deal with if the game it was planned for was flexed out. Certainly any network would want to keep the Cowboys no matter how bad they are. But Dak Prescott will officially have season-ending surgery, meaning you’re at best looking at Cooper Rush under center, and it’s looking increasingly like the Cowboys are throwing in the towel on the season and might not even be trying very hard against a Bengals team dealing with their own struggles. The NFL screwed up NBC’s plans to have Jimmy Fallon promote a special edition of The Tonight Show from MetLife Stadium, and while an alternate broadcast of the game itself requiring greater technical investment (not to mention a Cowboys game) would seem to be a higher bar to mess with, I’m not sure I would put it past the league in this season of aggressive flexing.

The question is what you flex it out for. The Bears and Rams have identical 4-5 records but feel worse than that; the Bears and Williams seem to have seriously regressed as they enter a brutal back half of the season including every one of their games against a division they’re probably the worst team in, while the Rams’ Monday night home loss to the Dolphins dampened any thought that the team that scored one of only two Vikings losses on the season might be better than their record. If Fox does want to keep Bills-Rams, the Bears might be in a big enough freefall by the time the game is played that Bears-Niners wouldn’t really be an improvement – not to mention that this actually would be the situation the league would be reticent to give a team consecutive Monday night games in, with the Bears playing on Monday again next week. I actually wouldn’t rule out Falcons-Vikings being selected; Bengals-Cowboys would be a strong enough choice to anchor the front half of the Fox doubleheader even with the Cowboys in the tank (of course, that could just as easily be an argument not to flex it out at all) and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of the Panthers going on enough of a run to make their game against the Eagles at least marginally attractive.

Week 15: The two games that are clearly the best on the slate are the two lead late doubleheader games, which could pose a problem for CBS and Fox since they’d have to compete with each other. The Raiders continue to be one of the worst teams in the league, but it’s not like there were much in the way of expectations for them to begin with, and it’s not clear how much ESPN cares about the cable-only halves of these “doubleheaders”. On the other hand, that also means that even if the league’s only alternatives involve teams just below .500, the league might still be willing to pull the trigger. Early in the season it looked like Colts-Broncos might be our first game to be flexed into Thursday night, but not only did the Rams improve on their slow start, the Colts are not looking very good at all, and a feisty Bucs team that took both of last year’s Super Bowl participants down to the wire – admittedly at home – could end up making their game with the Chargers the best choice. But no team has been scheduled for more than two Monday night games entering the season in the two years of the Monday-night flex era, so I’m not sure if the Chargers can end up with four, let alone three in four weeks.

Week 16: Thursday night flexing was officially introduced on a two-year trial basis, and part of the reason I thought the league might want to flex out Rams-Niners for Colts-Broncos was to get the test case for Thursday night flexing they were looking for. A lackluster Battle of Ohio has seemed safe given that all of the TNF-eligible games have involved bad teams (Eagles-Swing States is technically TNF-eligible but the first matchup between the teams is already on TNF), but if the league is really desperate for such a test case, could they take a flier on a team with an only marginally better record than the Browns?

Carolina is now on a two-game winning streak, and while both wins came over bad teams, Bryce Young has shown signs of improvement since returning to the starting role. They’re now on bye so can’t improve their record further, but if the Browns falter on the road against one of the teams the Panthers beat, the league just might be willing to pull the trigger on the Panthers’ game against the Cardinals – though it doesn’t help that two of the Panthers’ next three games come against the Chiefs and Eagles. (There’s also some question whether there’s actually a hard prohibition on teams having two road short-week games if they’re flexed into a second one, which would open the door for Broncos-Chargers – if Fox doesn’t protect it.)

CBS, meanwhile, may be hoping that the Dolphins’ win over the Rams is the start of them salvaging their season, and can take heart in the fact that the only non-Bills team the Dolphins have lost to with Tua Tagovailoa in the lineup is the Cardinals, a loss that looks better by the week. Between now and when the decision has to be made, the Dolphins face the Raiders, Patriots, Packers, and Jets – a stretch they could easily go 3-1 on, which would put them just below .500 and in the thick of the playoff picture. But that means that, if Bengals-Cowboys doesn’t become the second Cowboys game to be flexed out, Bucs-Cowboys easily could be, yet even after an upset win over the Falcons the Saints continue to look like flex-out material as well. Could Fox be willing to give up both Broncos-Chargers and Vikings-Seahawks, two games trapped in the late singleheader with limited distribution, considering the two strong divisional matchups anchoring their singleheader slate that don’t need to be protected, perhaps preferring to keep Giants-Falcons, and considering unexpected Cowboys and Packers games to be acceptable consolation prizes? The league would sure want them to.

Week 17: The league has a big decision to make with Falcons-Palpatines: leave it to anchor the NFL Network tripleheader, potentially dooming NBC to air a highly lackluster Dolphins-Browns contest, or send it to NBC but leave NFL Network to air a game involving a bad team with no playoff hopes? The problem is that only three games on the Fox and CBS slates aren’t divisional rematches of games on the wrong network, and all of them pit two teams below .500 with the Bucs being the only team in any of the games with as many as four wins.

Right now if I had to guess, I would think the league would go ahead and put Falcons-Palpatines on Sunday night, and lead off the tripleheader with whichever of the Colts and Chargers is in better playoff shape, on grounds that NBC is more important than NFL Network (and at least all of the four games would have playoff implications for at least one team), but I could also see them putting pressure on CBS to leave Panthers-Bucs unprotected if the Panthers go on enough of a run to at least have a shot at stealing the division. (Meanwhile, keep an eye on Fox’s late doubleheader window; if the Cowboys go in the tank, having Cowboys-Eagles switch places with Packers-Vikings could look mighty appealing.)

Week 18: On FS1’s The Herd on Tuesday, Nick Wright predicted that Niners-Cardinals would be the Sunday night finale with the winner winning the division and the loser missing the playoffs, and right now those certainly look like the best two teams in the NFC West with an uphill path for either one to take a wild card away from the NFC North teams or the NFC East loser. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on as the season progresses.

With how wide-open the AFC playoff picture is, and every division having at least one seven-loss team, pretty much any game has a shot to be moved to a standalone window; even Dolphins-Jets could have a shot if the Dolphins can climb back into the playoff picture, though that would require them to fall behind the loser of a single game with a loss, which doesn’t seem to be shaping up at the moment. Bengals-Steelers might be the most likely AFC game, but the gap between them would be tough to close; Chiefs-Broncos would have a shot but at this point I’m not sure how likely it is the Chiefs will have something to play for. Just about any game has a shot in the NFC as well (though the NFC South, with two decent teams fighting for what will likely be one playoff spot and not playing each other, seems unlikely) but besides Niners-Cardinals, the NFC North games, Vikings-Lions and Bears-Packers, are also highly likely to have implications for at least three of the teams involved. Right now I would definitely bet on Niners-Cardinals and Vikings-Lions getting two of the three standalone windows (unless the result of Vikings-Lions could leave the Packers with nothing to play for), with the third going to a team in the back of the tiebreaker order.