NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game, except in this opening section.

On Thursday Lamar Jackson made his triumphant return under center for the Ravens as they walloped the spiraling Dolphins 28-6, with the team picking up twice as many wins over the last five days as they had the entire season up to that point. It’s given them a good enough record that their games will qualify for being flex candidates on next week’s post, but it’s also weirdly unsurprising. Even when the Ravens were sitting at 1-5 and staring at what would ordinarily be daunting odds of making the playoffs, it was hard to write them off entirely. The Ravens faced a daunting first quarter of the season with three of their first four games coming against not only playoff teams but legitimate Super Bowl contenders, and right when their schedule looked like it might start getting easier, Jackson went down and the Ravens found themselves getting blown out by the mediocre Texans. The Bills’ struggles (getting outplayed by the Patriots at home and losing to the mediocre Falcons) have made it look like even the full-strength Ravens aren’t as good as we’re used to, but there was always reason to think that, when healthy, the Ravens were substantially better than 1-5 made them look.

And now that they’ve cleared that early season gauntlet, the path might be clear for them to make the playoffs. The Browns are still the Browns and the Bengals are going through yet another season from hell without Joe Burrow, leaving the Steelers as the only other respectable team in the division, and they haven’t been performing as well as you’d like either. The Ravens entered the week only two games back of the division lead with both Steelers games still to play, and their respective schedules go in very different directions. The Steelers have only one game against a team with a losing record that isn’t in their division the rest of the season, while the Ravens face only two teams with winning records that aren’t the Steelers: the Patriots Week 16 and the Packers Week 17.

Unfortunately, that means they won’t be much help for flex scheduling windows that otherwise find themselves lacking in options – especially since the second Steelers game is Week 18, which also means the first game in Week 14 probably can’t be flexed away from CBS in a week they have the singleheader (and where they already have another flex-immune potentially-division-deciding game in Colts-Jaguars). Ravens-Patriots falls in the one week that doesn’t need the help to provide flexing options, although if it comes down to that game or Jaguars-Broncos I think Ravens-Patriots would get the nod on name value all else being equal (although Jaguars-Broncos being a late singleheader game could counteract that).

But the broadcaster hoping the hardest to see a Ravens winning streak would be, of all things, Peacock. When the schedule was announced it looked like the league had made a big splash with its Saturday Week 17 games with multiple games pitting teams expected to have winning records coinciding with Peacock picking up the rights to one of the games, with the centerpiece being Ravens-Packers, a Tier 2 game that any of the networks would be proud to have in one of their regular marquee windows. Those games have almost all disappointed, and the only Saturday-eligible game pitting two teams at or above .500 at the moment is Seahawks-Panthers, a game that wasn’t expected to be particularly good. If the Ravens make a push for the playoffs, Peacock’s original vision of getting a game between marquee teams with playoff implications in primetime is back on the table, with Seahawks-Panthers or Texans-Chargers providing a more than suitable undercard game for NFL Network.

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 21 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, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
• On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in 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. 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 without the team’s permission.
• 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.

2025 Week 11 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	5-3	6-2	@KC: TNF
	5-2	6-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/16)
	5-2	5-2	@SEA: TNF
	6-2	5-2
	5-3	4-3
	4-3	3-4	@CHI: MNF
	4-4	3-4
	3-5	4-3

Week 11: Under the new flex scheduling regime, Week 11 doesn’t really feel like a flex scheduling week anymore. The Sunday night game pits what might be the two best teams in the NFC in a potential playoff preview, yet the Chiefs have beaten both teams in that game to establish themselves as Super Bowl contenders yet again, with their game against the Broncos potentially helping set the pecking order in the AFC West. Meanwhile, TNF is stuck showing the 1-7 Jets while MNF has a matchup between two mediocre teams, but neither game can be flexed out this early despite a number of potentially appealing games on the Sunday afternoon slate.

Granted, the Bills have two short-week games so CBS would be able to protect Chargers-Jaguars and keep all three of their games between teams at or above .500 from moving to Thursday, and “Cowboys uber alles” would probably apply to the Monday game. Still, as it stands the flexing situation isn’t particularly interesting here; if the Bills beat the Chiefs on Sunday the gap between them would be a game and a half, and if Chiefs-Broncos was in a conventional flexible window I would say the tentative bias and the name value of the teams would carry the day. And the 4:25 window has a higher bar for flexing than that, especially for a West game that can’t move to the early window. Final prediction: no changes.

2025 Week 12 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	6-2	3-4-1	@PHI: NBC
	6-2	5-2
	4-4	5-3
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/23)
	7-1	5-3	KC: 7 PT
	4-3	4-3	CHI: Fri W13
	3-4	5-1-1	@MIN: W18
	6-2	3-5	CIN: TNF W13

Week 12: Is the Panthers’ 4-4 start a mirage, or are they actually a decent team? For ESPN the question might be academic, because with this being the week before Thanksgiving, the only games that even need to be protected from a move to Monday involve teams at 2-5 or worse, so as I predicted back in May ESPN is likely stuck with it. With the Saints coming to town next week the Panthers have a decent shot at entering the decision point no worse than 5-5, but even if they’re 4-6, the Cardinals at 4-5 at best won’t overcome the tentative game bias even if CBS doesn’t protect them for some reason.

Meanwhile, Eagles-Cowboys isn’t the most impressive game, but “Cowboys uber alles” would still protect it and the late doubleheader window tends to favor the biggest, most marketable names over the best teams in any case. The Cowboys are on bye next week so would be 3-5-1 at worst in two weeks’ time, and if they weren’t the Cowboys and this were a conventional flexible window, I would think a 5-4 Vikings team would have a decent shot at supplanting it, but even then that’s still the same game-and-a-half gap I thought would reinforce the tentative game bias in Week 11. All told, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect any change here no matter what happens the next two weeks. Final prediction: no changes.

2025 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	5-2	4-3
	6-2	3-5
	2-6	6-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/30)
	5-2	4-4	CAR: W12 MNF
	3-4	5-2
	3-4	7-1	@HOU: W18

Week 13: Now we get into the situations where flexes might actually be under consideration, and ESPN really has to be hoping that the Giants with Jaxson Dart are more like the team that beat the Chargers and Eagles at home than the one that couldn’t even beat the Saints on the road, because the limited options here could be a source of endless frustration otherwise.

Giving a team consecutive Monday night games by flexing in a game in the second of the two weeks is more acceptable than the reverse because it doesn’t change the rest mismatch, just the total amount of rest for both teams, but I suspect it was probably still a bridge too far for the league in Week 13 last year, and if the league isn’t willing to do that for the Panthers, the only games available would involve teams with records as bad or worse than the Giants. I still think the Cardinals are better than their record – all their losses are by one score, including to the Niners, Seahawks, Colts, and Packers – but they also have a home loss to the woeful Titans and their schedule doesn’t get any easier with the Cowboys this week the only team without a winning record they play until December. Hoping for the Ravens to go on a winning streak isn’t an option either; their game against the Bengals is on Thanksgiving night and can’t be flexed.

Washington’s struggles (both on the field and with injuries) may be starting to make things interesting, as their record is only a game better than the Giants and Rams-Panthers can potentially be flexed to Sunday night. It’s not the best solution with the Panthers only at .500, but it’s still the best game on the entire Sunday slate that’s not slated to be the lead late doubleheader game. If the Sunday night game ends up in flex-worthy territory and the Panthers and Vikings are both strong enough to be flex contenders, the question of which game Fox protects, and if it’s Vikings-Seahawks, whether Rams-Panthers has enough name value to justify a flex, could get interesting. The league would much prefer to flex in Vikings-Seahawks not only because of the name value and the storyline of Sam Darnold facing the team he carried to the playoffs last year, but because it would be trapped in the late singleheader window otherwise, although it’s not enticing enough to force Fox to leave it unprotected. Is there a scenario where the league uses the prospect of a Sunday night flex to push Fox into protecting Rams-Panthers, then flexes Vikings-Seahawks into Monday night? Depending on how things play out and how much is reported, this could be an intriguing glimpse into how the protection regime really works with multiple flexible windows.

2025 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	3-4-1	5-2
	3-5	5-2
	3-4	5-3	6-day flex
	6-2	5-3	“Funday Football”
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/7)
	4-3	5-1-1	TNF-safe (CHI BF, GB TG)
	7-1	4-3	@IND: FOX
	5-2	3-4	ATL: W15 TNF
	3-5	3-4

Week 14: ESPN announced this week that their third “Funday Football” altcast will take place the week of the Eagles-Chargers game. This raised eyebrows for me; last year’s Bengals-Cowboys game was seemingly determined before the season based on the lead time necessary to prepare the altcast, and effectively couldn’t be flexed for the same reason. Eagles-Chargers looks great now, with the teams combining for as many losses as the Bengals alone do in the game I’ll discuss in the next paragraph, but the Chargers in particular could have easily gone into a tailspin with an early-season injury to Justin Herbert (or any other key player; witness how mediocre they were with Joe Alt out). For as much as last year’s game seemingly left ESPN regretting it, at least the Cowboys always had “Cowboys uber alles” on their side; how realistic a possibility was it that ESPN effectively locked themselves into a game that would otherwise warrant a flex where one team basically has no fanbase? And with this year’s “Funday Football” airing on linear networks, does ESPN give consideration to going back to using it on international games once the NFL Network purchase is final so it doesn’t break flexing, or would that break NFLN’s minimum exclusive game requirement with cable operators?

Now then, Fox’s triumphant embrace of an all-AFC matchup in their featured window has run headlong into the reality of yet another injury to Joe Burrow. Joe Flacco’s upset win over the Steelers raised the prospect that they just might be able to keep their head above water through the middle of the season, so naturally they turned around and gave the winless Jets their first win of the season and Flacco might not even play against the Bears. It might not take much for Fox to crawl back to their NFC security blanket in the form of the league’s oldest rivalry, and if the Bears knock off the Bengals it might be hard for them not to.

Certainly Fox may have to decide which game they want to roll with if the Texans continue to struggle, because Rams-Cardinals (who meet again Week 18) is the only game on their slate that can’t move to Sunday night. But right now Bears-Packers is the only game on their slate, and one of only two on Sunday, pitting two teams above .500, meaning none of the games that would be available to the league would be any better than one involving the Texans.

2025 Week 15 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	3-4	6-2
	5-2	5-2	LAR: W16 TNF
	5-1-1	6-2	GB: W16 Sat
	3-4	3-4-1	6-day flex
	2-6	4-3
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/14)
	7-1	5-2	SEA: W16 TNF
	5-2	6-2	@BUF: SNF
	5-3	5-3	v. LAC: YT

Week 15: Back in May, I mentioned that the Sunday slate this week was so riddled with games that couldn’t be flexed that the only reason it didn’t represent a failure by the league to schedule with flex scheduling in mind was because of the principle of “Cowboys uber alles”. Thankfully for NBC, the Cowboys have been more respectable than a lot of people expected after the Micah Parsons trade, and this game is at least one that the tentative game bias would favor as well – and even if it wasn’t, the Colts’ surprising season means the league actually would have a viable alternative to flex in. On the other hand, the Dolphins becoming a tire fire has resulted in a game warranting a flex that would be even more difficult to replace.

I was worried about CBS having a number of marquee divisional matchups they wouldn’t need to protect, but for the reasons mentioned last week, when it comes to Monday night CBS doesn’t even need to protect their hottest non-divisional matchups. All told, here is the complete list of all games that can move to this Monday night: Jets-Jaguars, Cardinals-Texans, Titans-Niners, Panthers-Saints. Only one of those four games doesn’t involve a team with a worse record as the Dolphins. ESPN might be hoping the Dolphins’ win over the Falcons is the start of them climbing out of the abyss, only briefly interrupted by hosting Lamar Jackson’s return, because as it stands they’re probably stuck with them.

2025 Week 16 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	5-2	5-2
	4-3	5-2	DET: Xmas
	3-5	2-6	6-day flex
	5-3	7-1
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/21)
	4-3	6-2	DEN: W17 TNF
	6-2	4-4	@TB: W18
	5-3	3-4-1	DAL: 6 PT DAL: Xmas

Week 16: Bengals-Dolphins, on the other hand, remains the likeliest flex on the slate. Fox has no fewer than three games involving only teams with better records than the Bengals, let alone the Dolphins (although one of them probably can’t move because the two teams have a rematch Week 18), and I’d still expect them to protect the weakest of the three because Cowboys. The Jaguars’ typically weak name value might be counteracted by the presence of Travis Hunter and the general prospect of both teams making the playoffs, making it a compelling enough candidate to rescue from the late singleheader. There’s still an off chance NBC wants to keep Bengals-Dolphins if it looks like it’s the game where Joe Burrow comes back, but that seems highly unlikely.

2025 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com
	6-2	5-2
	4-3	5-3	6-day flex
	5-2	3-4
2 of These Games to Saturday 12/27
	5-2	4-4
	3-4	5-3
	2-5	3-5
	2-5	5-1-1
	2-6	2-5
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/28)
	4-3	7-1

Week 17: On the league’s Flexible Scheduling Procedures page, Thursday night flexing is only mentioned to be applying to Weeks 14-16, implying that this year’s Christmas night game is not subject to flex scheduling. That should probably have been expected; Thursday night flexing is bad enough without also potentially ruining two teams’ Christmases on short notice.

In May I noted that the league seemed to be swinging for the fences when it came to the Saturday slate, just in time for Peacock to take over one of the Saturday flex windows that have heretofore been NFL Network’s turf, with no fewer than three potentially marquee (or at least, potential lead singleheader or early doubleheader) games slated for potential Saturday moves when there are only two Saturday windows. That has not worked out as hoped, with the Ravens’ slow start exacerbated by the Texans’ slow start and Bengals’ injury woes. A number of teams in the Saturday games have hope that they can improve on their current mediocre records and make the Saturday slate appealing, and if the Panthers stay above .500 their game against the Seahawks would at least be worth showcasing, but right now Jaguars-Colts is a better option than any of the potential Saturday games.

Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.