This year’s NFL schedule seemed to represent a shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy, going bigger in windows where you wouldn’t normally expect them to. Part of that has to do with how many teams the league has that are both good and popular, and how many of those teams play each other, thanks to the NFC East (the most popular, iconic division in football with the defending champions, the reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the single most popular team) being slated to play the NFC North (the next most popular, iconic division in football) and the AFC West (and the always-popular Chiefs plus young star quarterbacks on two other teams). The end result was that almost all the most valuable games to the TV partners were either Tier 1 or involved the Cowboys (who aren’t expected to be very good), with Packers-Steelers (and its potential matchup of Aaron Rodgers against his former team) being the only game outside those categories to be named more than once when I asked the 506sports Discord what the most valuable games were.
Mike North told CBS’ Jonathan Jones that this bounty of high-value games emboldened the league to schedule bigger in its marquee windows, but I never in a million years would have expected the league to schedule Chiefs-Cowboys, probably the two most popular teams in the league right now, on Thanksgiving, when the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game is usually the most popular regular season game of the entire year even when the opponent sucks. Normally you’d expect a game like that to provide a boon to one of the broadcast partners in a regular Sunday afternoon or primetime window, but the league seems to be coming out guns blazing to try and set the record for the most watched regular season game of all time.
Meanwhile, I don’t believe the league has ever scheduled a Tier 1 game for the final week of the regular season when there weren’t three Tier 1-worthy teams in the same division, so I thought for sure they would put the old “Cowboys-Indians” rivalry there despite being the most iconic rivalry involving the league’s most iconic team (after all, it has ended up in the final week before), but no: if form holds the top two teams in the NFC East will have an NFC Championship rematch at the site where that game was played in Week 18, potentially for the division title. (At the other end of the season, though, I wouldn’t put the decision to make the Cowboys Philadelphia’s Opening Night opponent in this category; contrary to popular belief there isn’t really any evidence that the league shies away from marquee games for Opening Night, though I don’t think they’ve gone for the biggest game of the entire year there.)
But this shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy doesn’t seem to have brought with it much of an improvement in how the league schedules the flex-scheduling period to minimize the likelihood that a big game gets stranded with regional distribution. Of course, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But with the increased protections given to CBS and Fox in the new contract that started in 2023, with each network being guaranteed half of each division rivalry and a minimum number of games for the most desirable teams in their respective conference, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I’ve come to realize that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.
(I should note that the division rivalry rule does have some wiggle room, even beyond North’s comments from last year. After all of last year’s Week 18 games were rematches of games slated for the “proper” network, this year Browns-Bengals is scheduled for Week 18 with the game in Cleveland on Fox, and after what happened to Texans-Colts two years ago I’m not going to assume it’s off-limits to a move to NBC or ESPN. More surprisingly, the Cardinals and Seahawks are slated to have one meeting on CBS and the other on a Thursday night, and those are two teams expected to be around .500 so that matchup might be just good enough for Tier 6. But I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that those cases both have one matchup on the other conference’s network, and they aren’t so high-powered that it’s implausible for CBS and Fox to approve of those moves. I don’t think it means the league has the freedom to flex in division-rivalry games or that CBS and Fox have to protect them if they’re rematches of games on another network, given we have firm evidence otherwise. Not that the league can’t flex in such games – see the link above – but it needs to be worth CBS or Fox’s while.)
With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Christmas, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.