Month: May 2026

Assessing the 2026 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This is one of the most bizarre NFL schedules I can remember, certainly since I started sorting games into “tiers” before the schedule release. There are several reasons for this that I’ll get into as we go along, but perhaps the biggest is that, despite neither the Bengals nor Jaguars qualifying for Tier 1, no fewer than four games that could have ended up in Tier 1 did not end up in featured windows (admittedly with two of them involving the Chargers, which has two games falling into Tier 2) – the most eyebrow-raising of which must certainly be Ravens-Bills Week 8. The two quarterbacks that squared off for the 2024 MVP, who put on an overtime thriller on Sunday night last year, get a 1 PM ET game when I would have thought it would have been one of the most coveted games for the network partners to put in featured windows?

“You could put Baltimore-Buffalo in any of our primetime packages and any one of our partners would have been thrilled to get it, and you might’ve had 18 or 20 million people watching that game,” Mike North said on a Friday conference call. “As a 1 o’clock anchor for CBS, it may get 75% of the country. You might have more people watching that game Sunday on CBS at 1 o’clock than you might have if it was on Monday night or Thursday night. It reaffirms our commitment to keeping Sunday afternoon strong.”

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What the 2026 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Thursday, and as I’ve done the last two years, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, at least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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The NCAA Is Expanding March Madness Solely to Spite Fox Sports

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It all could have been avoided if Fox and the NCAA had managed to work together.

It was first reported in September of 2023 that Fox was looking to create a new college basketball postseason tournament for teams in the three conferences that it has rights to: the Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East. The proposed tournament would have 16 teams and be played entirely in Las Vegas, and would effectively deprive the venerable NCAA-owned NIT of teams from those conferences. In response to the prospect of the new tournament, and with NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt acknowledging that “the very viability of the [NIT] could be in jeopardy”, the NCAA announced a series of sweeping changes to the NIT selection process, eliminating the automatic bids previously given to regular-season conference champions left out of the NCAA tournament and replacing them with a minimum two teams from each of the then-six major conferences with each of them guaranteed to host a game, which stood to greatly increase the number of spots going to power-conference teams at the expense of mid- and low-majors. Nonetheless, Fox and Anschutz Entertainment Group announced the launch of the College Basketball Crown that April with the first tournament to be held the following year, with a minimum of two teams from each of the three conferences Fox has the rights to and the remaining ten teams being chosen at-large.

After the first year, Fox and AEG announced they had “streamlined” the tournament by cutting it from 16 teams to eight, the likely reason for which was probably apparent when one looked at the inaugural bracket and saw three to five (depending on how you count Washington State and Oregon State) mid-majors included, including Boise State, which was actually the only team in the main NCAA tournament’s “First Four Out” to appear in any postseason tournament despite the other three coming from the Big 12 and Big Ten. Both years, though, the impact of the new tournament on the NIT has been evident and stark. In each of the last two years, only four out of 32 teams in the NIT have come from major conferences, including, oddly enough, Oklahoma State out of the Big 12 both years. Despite being entitled to two automatic bids, the SEC sent no teams to the NIT in 2025 and only one in 2026, though Auburn ended up winning the whole thing. But 2026 also saw perhaps the ultimate statement of the CBC’s triumph over the NIT: rather than going to mid-majors or the conferences that were contracted to it, the CBC’s two at-larges went to one team from the ACC and one from the SEC. The CBC had as many SEC teams as the NIT did, and they picked Oklahoma, who had beaten out Auburn as the first team out of the NCAA Tournament. After just two years, it was apparent that even for the teams that nominally should have been on the side of the NIT, the CBC had established itself as the more prestigious tournament, reducing the NIT to the status the CBI (seemingly fully killed by all this) once had: a third-tier tournament primarily for mid-majors.

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