NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 11

As someone put it on the 506sports Discord, we may have a 4-8 vs. 4-8 flex-eligible primetime game because of a cartoon sitcom.

On Monday Disney released another trailer for their “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast of the Week 14 Monday night game, seemingly doubling down on that game remaining Bengals-Cowboys. Shortly afterward, a Bengals beat writer tweeted that the game is ineligible to be flexed out due to all the work that has gone into the various art assets that would be used on the broadcast. Even considering the source I’m not sure I buy that it literally can’t be moved, but it’s pretty clear that Disney doesn’t want to back out of Bengals-Cowboys, and flexing it out would effectively cancel the alt-cast as reconfiguring it to work with another game would not be possible.

This likely all started with Disney not getting another Sunday morning European game this year, with its ESPN+ game instead forming part of a Monday night “doubleheader”. The previous “Toy Story Funday Football” alt-cast was associated with a European game that wasn’t subject to flexing, and if this had been in the works for long enough the idea may have been that this would be too. ESPN had explicitly said that the ESPN+ game would be an international game when the contracts were announced so I don’t think they would have backed away from that if Disney themselves didn’t want to (then again, I could say the same about Fox’s “as the schedule allows” Christmas games considering next year Christmas falls on a Thursday and the league could schedule two Christmas games with neither one on Fox), but nonetheless it was a change that may have left the people behind the alt-cast scrambling.

In retrospect, Disney probably should have chosen a game for the alt-cast that fell outside the flexible scheduling window and not run the risk of the game being flexed out, or at least not put themselves in the position where the league might want to flex the game out. But Bengals-Cowboys must have seemed like a pretty safe bet if the decision was made before the season or even in September. Disney surely observed the league’s practice of “Cowboys uber alles” over the last decade and a half, where Cowboys games would never be flexed out of Sunday nights even in situations where they absolutely would be for any other team, and figured that would apply here too. And hey, not only are the Cowboys always relevant in the Dak Prescott era, they’re playing the Bengals and Joe Burrow, who should always be contenders. So it may technically be flexible, but it’s not really flexible, is it?

Well, things haven’t worked out that way. The Bengals got out to what initially seemed like another slow start, something they haven’t been strangers to in the Burrow era, but have never really caught fire the way they have in years past, and after yet another blown lead against the Chargers their playoff hopes may be hanging by a thread. Against the Cowboys, that might not normally be enough to be flexed out. But the Cowboys aren’t just bad; with Prescott done for the season, they may well be actively tanking at this point, giving up on the season entirely. And Cowboys or no Cowboys, why would the league want to put on a team that isn’t even trying?

Perhaps the worst thing about it is, if the alt-cast really is preventing the league from flexing the game out, it’s not even a viable data point for where the bar is to flex out a Cowboys game. It’s a case where both teams could have poor records and be out of playoff contention, which has rarely been the case for past bad Cowboys games, but unlike with the one Cowboys game that did get flexed out, there shouldn’t be a risk that both teams will be eliminated from the playoffs entirely by the time the game kicks off, so there’s no way of knowing whether that situation would be enough for a flex in the future. We may never know if the only reason Bengals-Cowboys shows up on ESPN’s air in two and a half weeks is for the sake of an alt-cast that should get a fraction of the game’s audience.

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 final schedule commentary (Week 10 post): So the league does pull an early flex for a team being bad without any key injuries after signaling last year that they wouldn’t do that, as well as flexing out a game where the worse team has a star quarterback that can pop a rating regardless of their record for one where the worse team is only a game better than the one in the tentative, but doesn’t flex out a game involving a 2-8 team that should be easy to replace. Make it make sense. I guess I was right the first time when I suggested the league would be all the more reticent to give a team Monday night games in consecutive weeks than they are on Sundays, even if it’s the week after an existing Monday night game so all you’re doing is alleviating an existing rest mismatch. (I saw some concern that the league may have been worried about the effect on flexing in Falcons-Vikings the next week, but so much for that.) Possibly also a factor may have been that, with Browns-Broncos a West Coast game pinned to the late window if it was flexed out, it would have prevented CBS from showing Eagles-Ravens to a full national audience without some otherwise-needless crossflexes (when Fox already has two late singleheader games).

Week 14: See above. It’s also worth noting that I laid out in last week’s post how difficult the decision would be for Fox and the league which games should stay with Fox and which one should be flexed in; Falcons-Vikings is the best game but the rest of Fox’s early slate is weak enough that if it were flexed in Bengals-Cowboys may well end up anchoring the slot, and if it’s good enough to do that it’s good enough to stay on Monday night. (Also, if you flex in Falcons-Vikings you have to flex out Falcons-Raiders next week given the concerns about a rest mismatch that came up around Week 13.)

As for the late games, the good news would be that the Rams won to get back to .500 while the Bears, despite losing, arguably outplayed the Packers only to be screwed over by their coach’s conservativism; the bad news is that the Niners seemingly confirmed that they’re not the team we’re used to seeing from them by losing at home to a Seahawks team that might be the worst one in the division. Flexing in one of the late games means either Fox has to feature a game between two mediocre, albeit big-name, teams, or the league flexes in a game with a team only a game better than the worse team in the tentative again. The Cowboys are heavy underdogs against Washington but the other teams at 5-5 or worse are underdogs as well this week, so it may well be likely that things shake out such that even without the alt-cast, the “Cowboys uber alles” approach is entirely understandable. I’d still do a Last-Minute Remarks post under normal circumstances, but I’d have a pretty poor read on what the league might do no matter what, so there’s a part of me that’s almost relieved that these aren’t normal circumstances. Final prediction: no changes.

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: Barring a surprise announcement in the next twelve hours or so, the league seems to have passed up chances to flex out of two Browns games this week, seemingly validating the fears I laid out way back in my Week 7 post. Now all attention turns to the rest of the week’s featured games, which are mostly pretty lackluster; CBS’ late game may well actually be in the best shape, even before considering how lackluster the rest of their alternatives are, given that the Dolphins may be better than their record considering the games Tua missed.

The primetime games, though? If Bengals-Cowboys doesn’t become the second Cowboys game to be flexed out, Bucs-Cowboys easily could be, yet even after following up their upset win over the Falcons with a blowout of the Browns, the Saints continue to look like flex-out material as well. If that win streak turns out to be a mirage, both games’ fate could well depend on what Fox does with its protections. 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: Of the Browns games I expressed concern about in Week 7, it looks like there’s just one left. 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 at 4-6 or worse.

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 if the Dolphins can’t get back into the playoff race, 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 continue to tank, having Cowboys-Eagles switch places with Packers-Vikings could look mighty appealing.

Week 18: Niners-Cardinals and Vikings-Lions continue to be the best bets for games being picked for standalone windows, though if the Niners start to fall behind the rest of the NFC West pack that game might start to fade (and Seahawks-Rams may become a contender for a Saturday move). Chiefs-Broncos could be in the running as well if the Chiefs still have something to play for and a Saturday move wouldn’t run the risk of depriving other teams, such as the Bills, of having something to play for (brrr).

Otherwise, at least if I was setting the schedule, the Saturday games would all depend on which teams are in the back of the tiebreaker order. Bengals-Steelers would need to avoid the risk of potentially depriving the Ravens or other teams of having anything to play for, but Dolphins-Jets and Jaguars-Colts could be options; in the NFC, the NFC West games and Saints-Bucs could be in the running if they manage to close the gap with Washington, while Bears-Packers would be more complicated. If both the Saints and Bucs start to rally, keep an eye on Panthers-Falcons as well. If the current NFC division races don’t change, Giants-Eagles could be an intriguing possibility if Washington is still fighting for the wild card and the Lions need to beat the Vikings to sew up the division. Finally, if worst comes to worst and the league just prioritizes “playoff implications” over depriving other teams of playoff implications, they might turn to Chargers-Raiders or Natives-Cowboys for wild card seeding, Bills-Patriots or Texans-Titans for seeding among the AFC division winners, or Browns-Ravens for whatever category the Ravens end up in (again, dependent on what the Steelers might have to play for).