NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 12

Last week, I said that “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”. Well, guess what happened.

Literally minutes after that post went up, someone went on the 506sports Discord claiming to work at SoFi Stadium and that he’d been told to be available for December 19, implying if not stating that Broncos-Chargers was going to be flexed to that date. I was deeply skeptical; more than anything else it reminded me of the time someone went into my comment section claiming to work at MetLife Stadium and that they knew for a fact that (if I recall, since I can’t find the posts in question) a Raiders-Jets game that seemed to make no sense to flex in was nonetheless going to be flexed in. When that didn’t pan out, if I recall, they claimed to have misinterpreted the evidence they were looking at, but I’ve had enough experience running into people who seem to be pathological liars on Twitter, and seeing people fall for blatant misinformation, to know that someone can easily claim to have credentials they don’t have and make up anything they want to whip people into a frenzy.

But then people with actual credentials started weighing in. An NFL reporter for CBS said it was under consideration and that the league had until Friday to make the decision – implying, once the Browns beat the Steelers that night, that it wasn’t going to happen. Then a relatively random account said that the league had pulled the flex right before the midnight ET deadline that night, then a Cincinnati-area radio host, and finally the actual announcement came in around 11 AM ET.

I’ve got a lot to say about this, so I’m saving it for after the jump, but first, the rules spiel.

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.

I saw a lot of surprise at the announcement, and not just at how late the league made the announcement despite the Browns winning the Thursday night game, or even at the Broncos playing two road short-week games. It’s entirely possible that all three of that week’s other featured windows will end up with games that would be worth flexing out, and the league just sent what could be the best game among the available alternatives to Amazon. NBC, ESPN, and even CBS would have loved the prospect of having Broncos-Chargers on their air (although not necessarily outweighing the high-value teams NBC and ESPN have, and putting it on Monday night would probably have locked in the three games of the NFL Network tripleheader the following Saturday), and now the best alternative, and really the only one involving a team in serious playoff contention, is Vikings-Seahawks (assuming Fox doesn’t protect it), and the Seahawks feel decidedly mediocre and worse than their record.

I would argue, on the most basic level, that Browns-Bengals was the game that most needed to be flexed out, both in terms of the name value of the teams and the Browns’ record relative to other teams (even with the Browns’ win), and Vikings-Seahawks couldn’t be moved to Thursday night even without a two-road-game rule, but I really think what it comes down to is the point that I’ve hammered home repeatedly throughout this year’s iteration of this feature. The resolution that passed Thursday night flex scheduling made no mention of teams not being able to play two road short-week games (the only evidence of that I saw was a single tweet from Adam Schefter), but it did say that the league was introducing Thursday night flex scheduling “on a trial basis” and would only even apply to this year once it wasn’t used last year. Thursday night flexing, you’ll recall, was deeply controversial even among the owners, with eight teams voting against it, and no doubt instrumental in getting it passed was avoiding committing to it to the long haul, instead trying it out over a two-year period and seeing how it works out. In order to get any use out of that “trial period”, the league had to use it at least once. So I felt the league was determined to use Thursday night flexing at some point this season – even if they had to bend the rules to do it – so they could get some data on whether it would be worth retaining going forward. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is a typical situation where the league would normally pull a Thursday night flex.

Certainly this is giving us, the lay people, plenty of data, especially with this tweet from Albert Breer:

Broncos had to sign off on the Week 16 TNF flex, b/c it's their 2nd TNF road game. They were alerted Tuesday. Interesting element—Denver plays Cincinnati in Week 17 (X-mas week). Bengals got flexed out of TNF. So Denver gains the edge that the Bengals previously had for Week 17.

— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) November 22, 2024

The implication seems to be that the league actually made this decision several days in advance but, for whatever reason, didn’t announce it until Friday and may not have made it official until Thursday night. Not sure why they’d have done that, especially considering last year they announced a flex that didn’t involve the Thursday night game before the Thursday night game nearly a week before the deadline. The league may have simply been informing the Broncos that a flex was under consideration, and it’s possible the team didn’t even inform the league of their decision until Thursday, which brings me to the main thrust of the tweet.

Not made clear here is whether the requirement of team approval to give a team two short-week road games is the result of a formal process, or the equivalent of whatever’s needed to pull a “protection override” or otherwise allow the league to break its own rules. That has implications for whether two short-week road games are as prohibited as more than two short-week games more generally, and even what counts as a short-week game at all. (Remember two years ago, when the Cowboys and Titans had a second “short week” game before the rules allowing such were officially adopted, but they played each other the week after Christmas with an extra day’s rest because of the Sunday slate moving to Saturday when Christmas falls on Sunday? I had concluded that meant that having three days off fell under the short-week rules but four days off didn’t, and therefore that Black Friday didn’t count as a short-week game, but if the Cowboys and Titans had signed off on playing a second short-week game with the circumstances being a form of informal compensation, that line of reasoning goes by the wayside.)

I’m inclined to think that it is easier to flex a team into a second road short-week game than a third short-week game more generally, or else the league would have flexed in Vikings-Seahawks, but it’s also possible that Broncos-Chargers was easier to get approval for, especially since Vikings-Seahawks would have needed both the Seahawks to approve a third short-week game and the Vikings to approve a second road short-week one. In particular, the bit Breer brings up at the end – the potential to turn what had been a Bengals rest advantage for their game the following week into a Broncos rest advantage – suggest that the Broncos had a unique circumstance pushing them to sign off on the move that isn’t likely to come up very often.

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.

The problem is that the leading candidates had been Bucs-Chargers and Colts-Broncos, and both of the home teams in those games have now been flexed to the following Thursday night, disqualifying them from a Monday night flex that would give them one fewer day’s rest. And none of the remaining games have the advantage the Chargers and Broncos games had of taking place on the West Coast, which would have simplified the process of swapping them out for Falcons-Raiders on the Sunday schedule and instead would mean adding another game to take away from the marquee 4:25 games when there are already three “undercard” games (Patriots-Cardinals being the third). Were it not for my “test case” theory, that could lend itself to the notion that ESPN and the league don’t care enough about the cable-only game to pull a flex. But it’s worth noting that the Monday night games were scheduled for 8 and 8:30 PM ET, allowing for the late game to be flexed out for a CT or ET game, and last year’s “doubleheader” in the main flex period had both games starting at the same time, so the schedule seems to be arranged to allow for either game to be flexed, at least.

The Raiders’ record is so woeful – with the Broncos having already swept them, they’re only a loss or Broncos win away from being eliminated from the playoffs entirely, which wouldn’t sit well with the league’s stated desire for playoff implications in every featured window – that even a team at 4-7 might be enough to overcome the tentative game bias, and Sinners-Saints is particularly intriguing with the Saints only two games behind the Falcons for the NFC South lead, but the Saints are scheduled to play on MNF the following week so a flex would introduce a rest mismatch not already there, and while Saints-Packers is in the running to be flexed out it would be very odd for the league to flex the Saints in one week and out the next. I also wouldn’t immediately rule out Bengals-Titans or Cowboys-Panthers, both games involving 3-8 teams that could claim the two-game advantage over the worse team in the tentative that’s usually the minimum for me to consider a flex candidate, although the Cowboys might be too overpowered for the cable-only half of the doubleheader. (Chiefs-Browns would also fall in this category, but it likely can’t be moved with the Chiefs playing the following Saturday ahead of a short-week Christmas Day game.)

Could Bengals-Titans be flexed in with a Titans win over Washington and the Raiders falling to the Chiefs, putting the Titans at 4-8 compared to the Raiders at 2-10 and eliminated from playoff contention? Perhaps with some help from a Texans loss to the Jaguars or a Broncos loss to the Browns, putting the Titans two and a half games back of a team at 7-6 for a playoff spot and, in the case of a Broncos loss, playing a potential rival for that spot, or in the case of a Texans loss, currently holding a tiebreaker? I wouldn’t rule it out, but the Titans would still be enough of a long shot for a playoff spot that it might not be worth it, especially since the Bengals are also a long shot while the Falcons are a division leader trying to defend their lead in a tight race. But if the league doesn’t pull the flex, I can’t help but wonder if they would have pulled the flex if the week’s two best games weren’t in the 4:25 window, or if Bucs-Chargers and Colts-Broncos were available.

For completeness’ sake, I should mention that someone claiming to be a “Sports Reporter covering Pro and College Sports in Philadelphia” claims to have heard from an “NFL source” that another possibility could be in the running: moving Eagles-Steelers to Monday night, which would resolve the problem of the two best games of the week running up against each other, albeit in an odd way considering it would potentially be a cable-only game going on at the same time as an ABC game with less juice, while not leaving Fox completely out in the cold with Bucs-Chargers potentially becoming the new featured game. However, this person seems extremely sketchy, with punctuation, capitalization, and grammar choices even in formal articles/blog posts suggesting that at minimum English might not be their first language, and the “source” admits that Fox may have “protected this game at the start of the season”, which a) suggests the “source” doesn’t actually know anything, b) potentially completely nullifies their claims if Fox isn’t willing to give the game up, and c) betrays a lack of understanding of how the protection rules have ever worked. (Also, the same post claims Eagles-Swamp Monsters the following week could move to 4:25 or SNF, so they don’t know about the protected-division-rivalry rule either, although as I’ll explain in a moment people who should know better seem to have forgotten it as well.) I’m not putting any stock in it, finding it no more plausible than what a certain commenter of mine would say, but I bring it up as an interesting possibility to keep an eye on. Final prediction: no changes.

Week 16: Appearing on Kevin Sheehan’s podcast last week, Ourand addressed the host’s question of whether Eagles-Swamp Monsters could be flexed in for Bucs-Cowboys by saying “there is no way on God’s green Earth that they are going to flex the Cowboys out of a primetime spot”, forgetting that it’s already happened (and that the Washington game can’t be flexed in as a rematch of a game that was played on Thursday night). He subsequently voiced surprise on Twitter to find out that it was seriously being considered.

Well, allow me to put your mind at ease, John: it’s back to being out of the running. The Cowboys’ win over Washington largely put to bed the notion that the Cowboys would be tanking down the stretch without Dak Prescott, which was the main argument for flexing out games that still had playoff implications for their opponents. With the Giants, the only team in the NFC clearly worse than the Cowboys, coming to JerryWorld on Thanksgiving, the Cowboys just might have a shot to at least climb back into the outskirts of the playoff picture. The “Cowboys uber alles” rule is back in effect, at least for now (see below).

Between that and the Thursday night flex, the only question left is whether Vikings-Seahawks gets flexed in for Saints-Packers; Niners-Dolphins in CBS’ late doubleheader slot is underperforming, but the Dolphins have caught fire with Tua back, the Niners have a very real shot to win the division despite a disappointing season, and both teams are very much in the thick of the playoff hunt, so that game should be safe at least for now. The Saints have their own win streak going following the return of injured players and their own weak division leader that puts them closer to a playoff spot than their record could indicate, and the Vikings are slated to play on MNF the previous week, though this would be the scenario where a flex would merely alleviate an existing rest mismatch. There’s also the fact that Vikings-Seahawks is the only decent game on Fox’s slate that needs to be protected, plus the name value of the Packers. But if worst comes to worst, 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 an unexpected Packers game to be an acceptable consolation prize? For now, it’s still a situation worth keeping an eye on.

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 the only team involved in any of the games not at 4-7 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, the Cowboys’ win makes the prospect of Packers-Vikings switching places with Cowboys-Eagles for the lead spot on Fox’s doubleheader less appealing, but it could still end up happening if there’s a risk of the Cowboys being eliminated from the playoffs before the game is played.

Week 18: At this point Vikings-Lions might be the clear favorite for Sunday night if the Vikings continue to keep pace in the division race; Niners-Cardinals is still strong, but it doesn’t look like the Niners are anywhere close to the team they were expected to be and there’s a good chance all four teams will take things down to the final week, with Seahawks-Rams having as good a chance for at least a Saturday spot as anything. With three division games between now and decision time, it’s way too early to tell what’ll happen in the NFC West. 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). If the Saints start to make the NFC South a three-way race, the games in that division could become contenders; a three-way tie entering the final week could result in Saints-Bucs determining which team would be rooting for the Panthers when they travel to Atlanta.

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 most relevant games would be the South and West games that are already in the running to decide their respective divisions. 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. Texans-Titans could be a viable last resort if the Texans have a chance to climb to the 3 seed. 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 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).