NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

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

After I mentioned the multitude of 2-win teams last week more people from outside our little corner of the NFL galaxy have taken notice; maybe it’s because the Titans and Panthers winning means the 2-7 teams are now tied for last place, or maybe it’s because they more than outweighed the Jets winning to make the number just a little bit bigger. I already said all I needed to say about that last week (though my Browns-make-a-run-with-Winston prediction isn’t looking too hot), so all I’ll say now is that having more two-win teams and having them be in last place makes putting together the graphics all the more difficult. It’s also striking to note that the 2-6 Titans (and Dolphins) make the “waiting in the wings” section of the AFC playoff picture, yet there are still four AFC teams absent from there because they’re at 2-7.

I think this week I’ve run into the limitations of this opening section. It worked well last year when I kept getting insights into the league’s thought process nearly every week (even if those insights have increasingly proven useless), and also when I had a point to make about a specific team that spanned multiple weeks of the main flex period. But now, with Bengals-Chargers being flexed in for Colts-Jets, we’ve gotten a flex decision that has wide-ranging consequences for how I approach this feature going forward, and I’m hesitant to say anything up here because that might not leave me with much to say for the week’s actual post-mortem section – though I will say that by the end of this season, I may have radically re-calibrated my expectations for when and how the league will pull the flex. More on that after the jump.

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 final schedule commentary (Week 8 post): When I kept banging the drum not to expect Jaguars-Eagles to be flexed out, I felt like I was on an island. Not this time. It really did seem like once the Jets beat the Texans, that closed the door on the possibility of Colts-Jets being flexed out, between the Aaron Rodgers factor and NBC’s plans for a special Tonight Show after the game including Jimmy Fallon promoting the show from MetLife Stadium. I saw some talk that the determining factor may have been the Colts and how lackluster a game they played on Sunday night in Joe Flacco’s first game as starter, which seems like it’s forgetting the blazing start the Vikings had to the season. It’s a sign the league is being much more aggressive with flexes than they were last year, or in the past – especially since the Bengals were only a game better than the Jets at the time the decision was made, which is normally the sort of situation where I expect the tentative game bias to hold. That could suggest the presence of a narrative, of star players that can be sold to audiences and perhaps big-name teams with large fanbases, can allow games that might be only marginally better than the tentative to be flexed in.

(This also provides some clarity to the flex rules; clearly CBS didn’t have a hard minimum of seven Chiefs games and had to protect Chiefs-Bills. It’s also probable that Fox felt they didn’t have to protect Packers-Bears and could protect Falcons-Broncos, but it’s not certain because the Falcons and Broncos don’t have the star power of a Burrow or Herbert – though I do doubt the league would have taken a game involving a team only a game better than the Jets if Falcons-Broncos was available.)

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, and the Niners, Rams, and Chargers increasingly look like they might be good enough that their respective games don’t need to be flexed out. I’ve been talking up the flexing attractiveness of Lions-Colts, but the Colts are below .500 at the moment, making it actually a worse game than any of the games currently in flexible featured windows, and it’s not clear how well they’ll hold up going forward. It looked like this might be a flex early in the season, but we’ve reached the point where there’s really no need to. Final prediction: no changes.

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. But with the Chargers blowing out the Browns, making their upset win over the Ravens look like a mirage, this is becoming a very real situation to watch, and the Chargers having consecutive Monday night games (and potentially four straight primetime games more generally!) isn’t as bad a situation as I might have once thought, if anything alleviating the existing rest mismatch between the Chargers and Falcons by at least giving the Chargers a full week off. (A flex the week before an existing Monday night game would be something the league would be more hesitant to do.)

Week 14: Dak Prescott will go on injured reserve with a torn hamstring, and may end up having season-ending surgery. My first thought on reading that was that the Cowboys’ season is over. They’re already out to a disappointing, lackluster start, they have two, maybe three games on the rest of the schedule where they won’t be clear underdogs, and now they’re going to be trotting out Cooper Rush for at least the next four weeks. This may be the moment where the team decides to pack it in and go in the tank the rest of the season.

Which raises the question… is this the situation where a Cowboys game might be flexed out?

The one previous time the Cowboys were flexed out, both of the teams involved in the game had poor records to the point where there was a possibility both teams could have been eliminated from the playoffs before the game kicked off. That’s not the case here; there’s too much time left in the season and the Bengals can still improve on their record and contend for a playoff spot. And there have been plenty of times where Cowboys games have kept their spot even when the better team in the tentative hasn’t been that great. But if the league really is getting more aggressive with their flexes than they have in the past, flexing out the Cowboys could be a big statement in that direction.

It leaves Fox with a big decision to make in terms of their protection. Normally you automatically protect the current lead doubleheader game unless it stinks, right? But if Fox loses Falcons-Vikings, their next-best game other than Bears-Niners is Bills-Rams, which is stuck in the late window, and after that their only other games involve 2-7 teams, so they’d lack a good anchor for their early window. Bengals-Cowboys may well be their choice to anchor the early window in that scenario. If I had to guess, regardless of the specific protection, the league would flex in Bills-Rams and keep strong games in both of Fox’s windows as well as the Monday night window.

Week 15: When this feature started for the year the Rams and Niners had weak enough records, and the Colts and Broncos had strong enough ones, that I wondered if the league might get the test case for Thursday night flexing they were looking for, but now the Rams and Niners are at .500 while the Colts are below it, meaning the Thursday nighter is actually now the better game. But Colts-Broncos is still likely to be the best option the league has available to bail ESPN out of a massively lopsided Falcons-Raiders contest – assuming ESPN even cares that much 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 two-win teams. (Eagles-Swing States is technically TNF-eligible, but the first matchup between them is already scheduled for TNF.) There’s 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. But we also have the problem of two-win teams in the Monday night window and in CBS’ late doubleheader, and CBS doesn’t have any compelling alternatives short of a crossflex. 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? 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: 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 2-7 team? The problem is that only three games on the Fox and CBS slates aren’t divisional rematches of games on the wrong network, and not only do all of them involve 2-7 teams, only one of the teams involved has more than two wins – and that’s the Bucs in the only game Fox has to protect. 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 who knows. (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: With how wide-open the AFC playoff picture is, and the conference’s 2-7 teams all being in different divisions, pretty much any game has a shot to be moved to a standalone window, though Dolphins-Jets seems unlikely at the moment. Bengals-Steelers might be the most likely AFC game; 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 pay particularly close attention to the NFC West games, Seahawks-Rams and Niners-Cardinals. The NFC North games, Vikings-Lions and Bears-Packers, are also highly likely to have implications for all the teams involved.