Month: November 2025

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 12

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I’ve complained in the past about how much I often tend to struggle with filling out this opening section. That hasn’t been quite so much the case this year, but in some ways it’s grown more acute. The 506sports Discord locked itself behind Patreon at the start of the season, meaning I don’t have an antidote to the insanity of my comment section (or at least of one particular commenter), and I don’t have as much exposure to any developments or reporting that might have bearing on flex scheduling. (Though some quick Googling suggests that Mike North hasn’t done any in-season interviews of the sort he’s done the last few years.)

Here’s an example of something that might fill out this section but which would mostly be repeated in the weekly capsules: in the second installment of this year’s iteration of this feature, I noted the Dolphins’ woeful start and how it would, or wouldn’t, affect flex scheduling this year. Since then they’ve gone 3-1, with the only loss coming in Lamar Jackson’s comeback followed up by a big home win over the Bills (Miami’s first win over the Bills in three years and second in seven), and ascended to the level of mere mediocrity rather than outright disaster. Will that save their primetime appearances?

We’ll see. Part of the point of my bringing them up in Week 7 was that it was virtually impossible to flex them out of their Monday night game against the Steelers given the limited number of games capable of making that move and the questionable quality of the teams in those games, meaning that game was likely to keep its spot no matter what. More interesting would be their Sunday night tilt against the Bengals, which depends as much on what the Bengals do with Joe Burrow back as on the Dolphins. With games against the woeful Saints and Jets the next two weeks, there’s a very good chance the Dolphins will end up at 6-7 by the time the decision needs to be made (assuming the league can’t wait for the Monday night result when making a decision with six days’ notice), which I hear gets the kids all excited. Would that be enough to avoid a flex when the Bengals are already guaranteed to be worse than that?

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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 11

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

Last week Joe Burrow suggested that he’d like to return on Thanksgiving night against the Ravens. This week he showed enough progress in his recovery from injury as to raise the prospect of returning sooner than that.

On both Wednesday and Thursday, Burrow was noted as a full participant in practice, which – certainly in the aftermath of the trouble the Ravens got into with their (mis)use of the “full participant” designation earlier this year – should mean not only that he put in as much work as he normally would, but that he did so with the first-team unit. In a radio interview on Thursday morning, Bengals coach Zac Taylor didn’t rule out the possibility that Burrow could start as soon as this Sunday against the Patriots. It’s a bit surprising that the Bengals would even think about bringing back Burrow that quickly with a short week immediately afterwards – I saw it suggested that one reason the Ravens didn’t trot out Jackson against the Bears despite his “full participation” was to avoid his having a short week immediately afterwards and instead have his return be on a Thursday night – but the Bengals are also dealing with a shoulder injury to Joe Flacco that has left him a limited participant in practice, so they may feel they might as well maximize the continuity at the position by bringing back Burrow rather than trot out a backup for one week.

It might be a fair question to ask why the Bengals are considering bringing Burrow back at all; at 3-7 the Bengals are a full three games back of the wild card, too far back to even show up on my playoff picture graphic, and the same distance back of the division which would seem to be the Ravens’ for the taking, so you couldn’t blame the Bengals for simply deciding to shut down for the season. But last year the Bengals were sitting at 4-8 at the start of December and won their last five down the stretch to just fall short of the playoffs, so they may feel they can do it again with a healthy Burrow and both of their games against the Ravens coming up – and it’s hard to find any wild card contenders other than the Bills and Chiefs that inspire any confidence (and in both of their cases, there’s a reason they’re not leading their divisions). But neither the Patriots on Sunday, nor the Ravens on Thanksgiving night, are going to be easy, and they may need to win at least one, maybe both, to keep their playoff hopes alive. (And it’s an open question how much Burrow can overcome the Bengals’ defense in any case; in their last three games before the bye the Bengals scored 33, 38, and 42 points, and lost two out of three with the win coming by two points. The offense has held up decently well with Flacco at the helm.)

Whatever happens, pay close attention to what the Bengals do the next few weeks. If he can stay upright and start the Bengals going on a run, it’ll be interesting to see if he can save the Bengals’ appearances in featured windows down the stretch. It’s too late for one of them, though, because on the same day the prospect of a Sunday comeback for Burrow came up, the league pulled the first significant flex-scheduling move of the year, at the Bengals’ expense.

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.

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Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 13 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Click here if you missed the Flex Schedule Watch on Saturday.

2025 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch
Through Week 11 (except MNF) | morganwick.com
CBS 4:25 Bills 7-3 6-4 Steelers
SNF Broncos 9-2 3-8 Washington
MNF Giants 2-9 9-2 Patriots
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/30)
FOX Rams 8-2 6-5 Panthers CAR: W12 MNF
CBS Texans 5-5 8-2 Colts @HOU: W18
FOX Vikings 4-6 7-3 Seahawks

Week 13: Even with the Vikings below .500, flexing in Vikings-Seahawks for Giants-Patriots might actually be justifiable, but flexing it in for Broncos-Cavalry might be iffy. But the question at this point is whether Fox can be convinced not to protect Rams-Panthers and whether the league thinks it’s worth a flex.

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, which could put Rams-Panthers off-limits for a Monday move. I’m also increasingly inclined to think that, given the choice between a Monday and Sunday night flex, the league would decide to keep the game pitting two big markets on the less important primetime package, especially since, as this article points out, moving games across days is especially dicey on Thanksgiving weekend when everyone is already juggling travel plans.

With Thanksgiving thinning out the slate of good games, Fox’s best 1 PM ET game if it loses Rams-Panthers would be Cardinals-Bucs, and while Vikings-Seahawks wouldn’t have markets as big as Los Angeles chewing up the distribution Fox is allowed for a late singleheader game like it did for Seahawks-Rams, nonetheless I wouldn’t expect too many people to be able to see it without Sunday Ticket or RedZone regardless of the quality of the early slate. So there’s a case to be made that Fox would actually be better off protecting Rams-Panthers – which does bring a big market of its own, albeit one lukewarm to its own teams – than Vikings-Seahawks. If that happens I think the league would stand pat and hope Jayden Daniels happens to be playing in the Sunday night game (and even if Rams-Panthers is available I suspect the league might be reticent to flex in a team with no name value that might not be as good as their record), and I also don’t think they’d flex a below-.500 team to Monday night on Thanksgiving weekend. But I don’t have a good read on this situation at all, and I wouldn’t be surprised by either game being flexed to Sunday night or Vikings-Seahawks being flexed to Monday night. Final prediction: no changes.

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

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

On Sunday the Seahawks and Rams will square off in a game to determine not only the lead in the NFC West, but at minimum, no worse than a tie for the best record in the NFC. Multiple figures have been declaring it not only the game of the week but potentially the game of the year… and it’s trapped on the late singleheader. Its distribution outside the West Coast is a bit broader than simply the home markets of teams playing on CBS in the early window – also covering most of the secondary markets of those teams, or at least the ones in the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Buffalo axis – but probably the majority of unaligned markets will get Bears-Vikings in the early window.

Suffice to say, the Seahawks were not expected to be this good. Back in May, their win totals at sportsbooks was around 8.5 or even 7.5, so expectations were for them to finish around or even below .500, despite narrowly missing out on the playoffs and adding Sam Darnold coming off a near-MVP-level campaign. That was good enough for their games to qualify as Tier 6, but when I put together a graphic for the week’s games after the schedule came out, this game didn’t even crack the top four games not slated for featured windows, with Niners-Cardinals getting the nod for recognition on the graphic – in large part because Seahawks-Rams wasn’t going to be available for flexing (more on that later, and more info on my thoughts on the schedule release in general in the list-of-primetime-appearances count link below). But the question seemed to be moot, because the two best games of the week seemed to be in flexible featured windows – Tier 2 Chiefs-Broncos and Tier 1 Lions-Eagles – so there didn’t seem to be a need for flexing anyway.

I did warn that there was a decently high rate of divisional games that week that had rematches in primetime and couldn’t be flexed in, with Chiefs-Broncos, Bears-Vikings, and Bengals-Steelers specifically being noted as such in the graphic. But even at the time, Seahawks-Rams stung the most, because a high-profile game on the singleheader network is bad enough without it being in the late window. The NFL seems to prioritize high-profile games not being stuck on the late singleheader, once even “overriding” an existing protection on such a game to move it to primetime. Late singleheader games are limited in distribution to protect the main late doubleheader game, never crossing the 50% mark and rarely if ever even being the singleheader network’s highest-distributed game, though a late singleheader game getting the network’s A team does happen. The only real way to prevent a high-profile divisional matchup that can’t be flexed from being trapped on the late singleheader is for every West Coast game where the other half falls in primetime to fall in a doubleheader week for its respective network, and not only is that likely to be impractical, the networks and league probably don’t even want it if it dilutes the distribution for the main late game.

Of course, this raises the question of why this game was selected for primetime to begin with if the networks don’t believe in it, and whether we’re really missing out on the game of the year if these two teams will play again later in primetime – especially since I think the Rams are the better team (Seattle spent the last two weeks beating up on mediocre-at-best teams, whoop-de-do) so the rematch in Seattle should be more competitive than this game. The answer is that the rematch between these two teams is slated for Thursday Night Football, and TNF is still the primetime package with a greater diversity of teams featured (though not necessarily as much as MNF in the “doubleheader” era) at the expense of the quality of the game. It also means the rematch isn’t going to have that big an audience given the restriction of needing Prime Video to watch the game outside of the home markets of the teams playing.

Of course, the league, on paper, thinks enough of TNF and MNF to give them flex scheduling in the new contract, but as I mentioned a few weeks back I’m not entirely sure what that actually means for them, given the difficulties in flexing games to those nights. Week 11 was a big reason for that: I raised the question of the “iffy quality” of the games in those windows back in May and those worries played out to an even greater extent than was evident back then, with me spending several weeks commenting that Week 11 barely even felt like a flex scheduling week with the Thursday night game involving the woeful Jets and Monday night involving the forgettable Raiders. If you asked people what featured-window game they’d bump out for Seahawks-Rams, they might be forced to realize that Chiefs-Broncos and Lions-Eagles are still important marquee games in their own right. What makes the Seahawks-Rams situation so offensive is the offensive quality of the games on Thursday and Monday. The league may or may not see flex scheduling as meaning much to those windows, and they may or may not see them as worthy of putting decent games on for more than a handful of weeks a season, but maybe they should. Maybe the approach that treats those windows as a dumping ground should, at minimum, be throttled back around the middle of the season, a few weeks before the flex scheduling windows open for them. There are limits to how good their schedule can be top-to-bottom, but this is the part of the schedule where having bad games there hurts the most.

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.

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Can Streaming TV Providers Make Inroads on YouTube TV with Some Surprisingly Simple Steps?

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After thinking about it for the better part of a decade, my dad finally bit the bullet and dropped Spectrum cable this summer. What pushed him over the edge was being sold on T-Mobile Home Internet to supplement his T-Mobile cell plan, even though his T-Mobile cell signal isn’t particularly reliable in our apartment. (It works well enough that we don’t have any real problems with the Home Internet service dropping out even though we have the router on a ledge a decent distance away from any windows or doors.) Frontier fiber was also an option and one we considered last year, and probably would bring better, more reliable speeds, but I think he didn’t want the rigamarole of installing all the stuff that would entail compared to plugging in one router. But while Frontier offers a bundle with YouTube TV, T-Mobile has no such thing, and instead offers a plan that comes with subscriptions to the with-ads plans of Hulu and Paramount+; I don’t know if that can defray the cost of a more expensive plan, but if it does then it’s Hulu+Live TV, normally comparably priced to YouTube TV, that benefits from a T-Mobile Home Internet plan. Nonetheless, my dad signed up for YouTube TV and I didn’t object, and we didn’t have any reason to ditch it once the free trial ran out.

This despite the fact that we found YouTube TV’s interface overrated. By reputation, YouTube TV has the best interface and experience of any streaming TV provider, but coming to it from cable was not a smooth transition. This is especially the case early on when the algorithm hasn’t figured out which shows and channels you actually like and half the suggestions that show up are things you don’t care about. Leave that aside, and some of the quirks can’t be helped given the limitations of most streaming device remotes; on the Roku remote, a streaming service has a directional pad, an OK button, and a Back⬅️ button to work with, and if you’re lucky can find creative things to do with the DVR controls. So it’s unsurprising that there isn’t a one-button way to “channel surf” like there was on cable, or a number pad to pull up a specific channel instantly; that does mean that, if the channel you’re looking for is deep enough in the guide and the program you’re looking for doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions at the top of the Home or Live screens, you’re in for a lot of scrolling, but you can reorder the channel lineup to put the channels you actually watch at the top and mitigate that.

Nonetheless, there isn’t an easy way to pull up a description of the program you’re currently watching, and it’s even harder to pull up full descriptions of shows if the space on the Live (Guide) view isn’t sufficient; even for future shows hitting OK will generally pull up info on the show as a whole, not the specific episode or event in that time slot. If you want to scroll the guide more than a day into the future, there’s no way to advance the guide a day at a time like there is on a cable remote; the Rewind⏪ and Fast Forward⏩ buttons on the Roku remote do nothing on the guide, which seems like a missed opportunity. And while it at least used to be possible to put up the full-screen view and continue the program you were watching in the background, at some point in the last few months that stopped being the case, with the current program shutting off if you hit the Back button with no way I can tell to avoid it, which also means returning to the current program isn’t as simple as pressing Up until you’re above the menu bar.

To some degree, this is all stuff that just took some getting used to. For the most part, me and Dad have reached the point of handling the YouTube TV interface fairly smoothly. But all the talk of YouTube TV having the gold standard interface of streaming TV providers seems overblown; there are definitely some places where I could make improvements. And most other streaming TV providers have reached parity on the more concrete features where YouTube has historically stood out; Sling is the only major streaming TV provider that doesn’t offer unlimited DVR for no extra charge, for example. Multiview is now the feature where YouTube TV stands out the most, but it’s not such an overwhelming advantage that people are likely to look past more concrete issues for it. At the least, it doesn’t seem like YouTube TV’s interface and general experience is such an overwhelming advantage that no one can take a bite out of it, that the lack of, say, MLB Network shouldn’t drive people who would otherwise watch it away because the interface is so amazing.

And yet, it is. So much so that it may be leading Disney, for the first time ever, to be losing a carriage dispute. And it might say a lot more about other streaming TV providers than YouTube TV.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

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On Wednesday’s First Take, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo ranted about the Cowboys’ surfeit of nationally televised games. Of the eight games the Cowboys have after the bye, six are slated for featured windows – and one of the other two is in Week 18, where nothing can be slated for featured windows ahead of time. Russo acknowledged “I know they’re gonna get ratings” but begged Joe Buck not to claim that the Cowboys “have a chance to make the playoffs” when he calls the Cowboys against the Raiders in two weeks, declaring “They! Are! Out! Of! It!”

A few hours later, ESPN underscored why the Cowboys are scheduled for so many nationally televised windows and are unlikely to be flexed out of all of them. This past Monday’s Cardinals-Cowboys game drew 16.2 million viewers, the second-highest total ESPN has drawn in Week 9 since 2011. Two sub-.500 teams drew an audience a million viewers over Monday Night Football‘s season average despite the Disney networks being blacked out on YouTube TV. To put that in perspective, Saturday’s big Oklahoma-Tennessee game had the lowest viewership of any program to be the most-watched opposite a World Series Game 7 in over 20 years, by over two million, despite only one such program in the intervening time being a live event of any kind and none of them being live sports. I have to imagine it would have done significantly better without the YouTube TV blackout, yet Cardinals-Cowboys managed to hold up to the tune of nearly four times the audience. (That said, it was the worst viewership mark of the season for a game that wasn’t part of a “doubleheader”, trailing two games that were part of “doubleheaders” and last week’s Washington-Chiefs game that went up against the World Series itself.)

This is why “Cowboys uber alles” exists: no matter how bad the Cowboys get, they can draw good enough ratings that networks would line up to get a package of just their games, and even if this year’s Cowboys might seem to “stink”, their offense is good enough that even games that might look like mismatches on paper have the potential to be entertaining. That doesn’t mean the Cowboys are completely immune to flexing – witness Cowboys-Browns a few years ago or, if you count late afternoon games, Cowboys-Eagles last year – but it seems like either both teams have to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, or the Cowboys could be eliminated but wouldn’t be if the game was played at an earlier time. None of that is likely to apply this year; the Cowboys’ Week 17 game is being played on Christmas and can’t be flexed, while their Week 16 game is their one remaining game before Week 18 that’s not scheduled for a featured window, and the prospect of it being flexed into primetime will affect what game does get flexed.

That leaves only two remaining Cowboys games in flexible featured windows, not counting Eagles-Cowboys on Fox Week 12, both with enough time left in the season that Cowboys fans could still have an outside chance of making the playoffs: Cowboys-Lions on the Thursday after Thanksgiving, and Vikings-Cowboys on Sunday night Week 15. I think Bears-Packers could potentially be swapped for Cowboys-Lions and keep the “full week’s rest for both teams” component of the week-after-Thanksgiving game, but even if that was under consideration Fox would probably protect it and swap it in for Bengals-Bills in its late doubleheader window instead. As for Vikings-Cowboys, the NFL wishes it was the worst of its problems that week because if it were, and if they were willing to flex it, they could simply swap in Colts-Seahawks; instead, as we’ve detailed in past weeks, they’re stuck looking at the even worse Dolphins in the Monday night window without a viable alternative to pivot to. Still, if the Cowboys are far enough out of it by then, that might be a situation worth paying attention to.

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.

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