Assessing the 2026 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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.”

It is a CBS doubleheader week, so the only markets it’s likely to lose are markets in other games playing on CBS in that time slot, and Browns-Steelers is the only such game not involving AFC South teams – although the entire rest of the AFC North would be locked out of seeing it. But I personally would dispute that a marquee game in a singleheader or early doubleheader window would get more eyeballs than in a standalone window or at 4:25; the window may get more viewership, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the game will, especially if fans feel obligated to watch their own team’s game, and more to the point, any market deprived of a marquee game means potential frustrated viewers.

In any case, that reasoning doesn’t apply to the other Tier 1 games trapped outside of featured windows, all of which are on the singleheader. The same day as Ravens-Bills, Chargers-Rams is a 4:05 game on Fox, the dreaded “trapped in the late singleheader” game doomed to get limited distribution outside Los Angeles and the home markets of teams playing on CBS in the early window. Chargers-Bills Week 3 won’t be seen in several large markets, including New York and the Bay Area, and it probably won’t be seen in the home markets of the teams’ chief division rivals, Kansas City and New England respectively, as those teams are playing on CBS at the same time. The other game sure to be in Tier 1 that was sentenced to 1 PM was Rams-Eagles Week 4, which North even called out as another primetime-worthy game at 1 PM; it’s not likely to be seen in any top-five market outside those of the participating teams.

At least none of these games fall in the main flex period (although the only games both CBS and Fox might want to protect in Week 8 more than the Tier 1 games are divisional matchups with the rematches on other networks, which could be a problem when the Sunday night game involves a Washington team expected to be mediocre), but it’s a reminder that the goals the NFL has when putting together the schedule don’t necessarily align with what fans might want. Whenever a marquee game isn’t in a featured window, there is inevitably a round of whining and complaining about why fans don’t get to see the game and how the NFL dropped the ball, but the league is in the business of maximizing viewership for all its partners in all windows, including the singleheader and early doubleheader. For the first time in a few years the league can’t put Ravens-Bengals on at 1 PM to give that window a Tier 1 game, but instead of simply giving all the Tier 1 games standalone windows the league has reached further to put some Tier 1 games at 1 PM, including games whose attractiveness to the network partners can’t be denied. The NFL may be slowly killing the Sunday afternoon window in favor of creating more and more standalone windows, but for the moment, they’re also willing to sacrifice those standalone windows to prop up the Sunday afternoon slate.

It is, perhaps, here that we see just how much the creation of so many new standalone windows stretches the schedule thin. It would be one thing if the league was simply concerned about putting on good games in as many featured windows as they can; while they probably couldn’t stick strictly to games in the first five tiers in those windows, nonetheless the majority of games should still involve teams expected to be above .500. But the league also wants to ensure the 1 PM window isn’t chopped liver either, that it doesn’t just have the games left over after the truly big games are picked dry, and if the singleheader and early doubleheader are treated as featured windows as well, there’s no way to accommodate that without giving significant numbers of games to teams expected to be below .500. Most of Tier 6 was filled with games involving the Colts or Steelers, teams that had win totals of 8.5 at one sportsbook and 7.5 at another, and even that would only be enough to fill eight games of a seventh tier, leaving ten to involve a team at 7.5 at both sportsbooks I relied on. (Good thing that category includes Washington and the Giants, two NFC East teams one of which has a big-name coach coming in that could allow them to outkick their projection.)

It also points to why the reality of flexible scheduling so often seems to fall short of its promise. North claimed that “we don’t draft our way into primetime, we play our way into primetime” to explain why the Raiders don’t have any appearances in standalone windows despite drafting Fernando Mendoza and adding Kirk Cousins, but a lot of the time it seems like teams can’t play their way into primetime either (especially if they’re the Jacksonville Jaguars), not without getting very lucky with the other games being played that week falling just right to allow a flex to happen. 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, it’s become the case that, more often than not, if the best game of the week wasn’t already slated for a featured window, it’s not going to be flexed into one.

The premise of this post, and the What the Schedule Should Look Like post I put out before the schedule release, is that the league needs to take care when putting together the schedule in 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 in the post-2023 status quo, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I decided 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.

But if the league is intentionally scheduling marquee games for the singleheader or early doubleheader windows, outside the main flex period, we should consider the possibility that this state of affairs is, to some extent, entirely the point – that the league cares more about keeping CBS and Fox happy than actually maximizing distribution for the best games, that some games have been scheduled to intentionally put good games in the 1 PM window without any intention of flexing them in, and that flexible scheduling is intended to be used only if a game is so disastrous that they can bring in a replacement game and still have good games in every afternoon window. The purpose of this post would then become to see if the league did a good job of giving the primetime packages games good enough to justify leaving whatever games landed in the afternoon there.

In any case, given the other eyebrow-raising elements of the schedule, I can’t rule out that North is just doing damage control over a schedule that didn’t entirely meet the league’s goals, either because the two West divisions playing each other when each has three marquee teams severely restricted the league’s freedom (my fantasy schedule ended up breaking my own rules and left an AFC West division game trapped as a late-doubleheader undercard in a flex scheduling week), or because the scramble to negotiate rights to the games freed up by the end of the Monday night “doubleheaders” gave the league a later start than they would have preferred. (If so, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if the league eventually pushed the networks to move their “upfront week” a week later; North had said that upfront week wasn’t a hard and fast deadline, but the league sure seemed to treat it as such. At minimum, they announced a date for the schedule to be released a week in advance, but then took so long to finalize it that when ESPN announced that its Monday night opener would be Broncos-Chiefs, it initially wasn’t certain which half that would be.)

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 (not including any game involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.

	SNF	MNF	TNF	Tot	Flex	SuAf
	1*	2	1	7*	1	7
	2	2	1	6	1	8
	2	2	1	6	1+1	9
	3	2	1	6	2+1	8
	3*	2	1	6*	2+1	8
	2	1	2	6	2+1	8
	2	1	1	5	2	8
	2*	1	2	5*	3	8
	1*	2	1	4**	0+1	7
	1	1	1	4	0+1	8
	1	2	1	4	1	8
	1	1	2	4	1+1	9
	2	1	1	4	2	9
	2	1	2	4*	2+1	8
	2	1	1	4	2+1	8
	1	1	2	4	3	8
	1*	1	2	3*		9
	1	1	1	3*	0+1	8
	1	1	1	3*	1	7
	1	1	1	3*	1	8
	1*	1	1	3**	1+1	7
	1	1	1	3*	1+1	7
	1*	1	1	3*	2	8
	1*	1	1	3*	2	8
	1		1	2*		7
		1		1		9
			1	1		10
	1			1*	1

As a reminder, the appearance count for each individual primetime package counts all games carried by any outlet owned by NBC, ESPN, or Amazon, meaning the Black Friday game shows up in the TNF appearance counts for the participating teams. This also means teams that have been identified for a potential move to Saturday in Week 17 get asterisks in both the SNF and Total columns, because the Saturday games in that week are slated for NBC and Peacock; teams with games in the Saturday pool for both Weeks 16 and 17 get two asterisks in the Total column. The total column, however, only counts games that are actually being played in primetime, so Black Friday and Netflix’s Christmas games don’t count there, but Netflix’s Melbourne and Thanksgiving Eve games do. I’m also counting games airing on CBS on the Saturday of Week 15 and Fox on Christmas night, even though I still have trouble getting away from the notion of the purpose of the primetime appearance limits being to protect CBS and Fox first and foremost.

This chart points to some of the other ways that this schedule is bizarre. The Rams are slated for a full seven primetime appearances, and as with the Chiefs last year, I would normally suspect being part of the Week 1 international game helps with that. But they’re also one of the teams in the Week 17 Saturday pool, and I would ordinarily think that Rams-Bucs could only be flexed in (at least in the primetime window) if a previous Rams game was flexed out of primetime… except that according to Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, teams can now play in eight primetime games, being scheduled for seven and flexed into an eighth. Florio seems to be under the impression that this means the Rams can play in primetime in either Week 17 or 18, but not both, despite previous indications that appearance limits don’t apply to Week 18.

Does this mean the league has converted the ability to play in primetime in Week 18 regardless of appearance limits to a more general eighth potential primetime game that Week 18 does count for, or is Florio’s information inaccurate or being misinterpreted? It seems like an odd change to make without any reporting until after the release of the first schedule under the new rule (or possibly second, given the Chiefs last year and the fact that my previous set of information suggesting a 6+1 maximum came from 2023), and the Rams being the only team pre-scheduled for seven primetime games suggests there are still some restrictions on loading up on that many games (such as a primetime international game being a requirement), but nonetheless that’s going to have to be the primary thing I have to go on going forward, meaning a change to the rules spiel at the start of my Flex Schedule Watch posts.

While the Rams have the most primetime appearances overall, the Cowboys and Chiefs have the most appearances on NBC specifically at three apiece. That by itself isn’t surprising, but what is surprising is that, pending the Rams-Bucs game, the Rams only have one NBC appearance. Moreover, only two teams with primetime appearances, the Saints and Browns, don’t have any on NBC, the same number as Amazon and one fewer than ESPN (excluding NFL Network games). Last year six teams had primetime appearances without having any scheduled for NBC (though three of them were part of the Saturday pool that could, in theory, have landed them on Peacock), compared to three for Amazon and none for ESPN. Obviously the end of the Monday night “doubleheaders” makes it easier for ESPN to pull from fewer teams, but if the number of teams on each primetime package is inversely correlated with the quality of each package’s games, the implication is that Monday nights are now ahead of Sunday and Thursday nights.

The overall quality of games on NBC’s slate stood out to a number of observers when the schedule came out, and not in a good way. NBC did score Chiefs-Bills, wrenching the modern Brady-Manning rivalry away from CBS for the first time in several years, as well as Cowboys-Packers, but the rest of the slate before Thanksgiving is decidedly lacking. NBC has only three games at Tier 4 or above before then: Patriots-Seahawks in the Kickoff Game, Rams-Broncos Week 3, and the only Tier 1 game in that span, Chiefs-Seahawks Week 7. The games in the flex period are better, but they’re sprinkled in with some more questionable games; all told, NBC has eight games of Tier 4 or better on its slate, as well as a game in Lions-Panthers Week 4 involving a team with a win total below 7.5 at at least one sportsbook, one not even involving a name team. By contrast, ESPN has five games at Tier 4 or above before Thanksgiving, though only six overall (both excluding NFL Network games), while Amazon has four before Thanksgiving and eight overall; both networks also have a Panthers game each with Amazon adding a Browns game for games involving teams with win totals below 7.5. NBC does have three Tier 1 games overall to ESPN’s one or two and Amazon’s two, and the edge increases in Tier 2, but the real mark of how disappointing NBC’s schedule is might be the number of games involving NFC South teams: three combined appearances compared to ESPN’s four across two games and Amazon’s three.

Sunday nights are supposed to be the NFL’s premier primetime package. That ESPN seems to be limited to two pre-scheduled appearances of any one team, and Amazon is limited to two overall, while NBC can have three, suggests that NBC is supposed to be focused on more games involving more high-value and good teams. Last year NBC had four Tier 1 games to ESPN’s one (and CBS’ three!), and Amazon didn’t get any. This year the league seems to have treated NBC closer to being on par with the other primetime packages, with more games involving middling teams, resulting in people wondering what NBC did to piss off the league so much. Coupled with the number of Tier 1 games not getting featured windows, it suggests a significant shift in how the league prioritizes its partners and how it schedules its featured windows, one that goes beyond simply running low on good games to fill all its featured windows. The league could find space to give three primetime games to a Panthers team expected to regress from what was already a pretty mediocre finish, but not to find a featured window for Ravens-Bills? (Notably, I had figured, based on my experience putting together my mock schedule, that the only way NBC was going to get Chiefs-Bills was if CBS got Ravens-Bills for one of its late doubleheader windows. Instead the Bills’ game against the Patriots is their only appearance at 4:25 for CBS.)

When getting into the teams restricted from flexing into TNF, one thing worth noting is that the league formalized what I had thought was already a rule, specifying that Friday games don’t count as short-week games… while still defining a short-week game as one with fewer than five days of preparation, so Friday games following Sunday games should still count, they’re just exempted. Would have been easier and more consistent to simply define a short-week game as one with fewer than four days rest, but presumably there are political reasons not to do that. Regardless, here are the restrictions:

• Multiple short-week games (can’t be flexed in without a game being flexed out): Packers, Patriots, Ravens, Texans, Bears, Lions, Eagles, Cowboys, Bills
• One road short-week game (a second can only be flexed in with the team’s approval): Falcons, Steelers, Buccaneers, Seahawks, Panthers, Jaguars, Washington, Colts, Chiefs, Vikings, 49ers
• Completely unrestricted: Dolphins, Jets, Browns, Bengals, Titans, Chargers, Broncos, Raiders, Giants, Saints, Rams, Cardinals

That leaves the following games as possible flex candidates, not considering any restrictions on CBS or Fox’s end or the possibility of a team allowing a second road short-week game:

• Week 13 (Chiefs-Rams): Bengals-Browns, Chargers-Bucs, Dolphins-Broncos (potential rest mismatch from Black Friday) (with road team approval: 49ers-Giants, Washington-Titans, Panthers-Vikings)
• Week 14 (Vikings-Patriots): Saints-Panthers, Broncos-Jets, Chargers-Raiders (creates potential rest mismatch next week), Giants-Seahawks, Rams-49ers (with road team approval: Falcons-Browns)
• Week 15 (49ers-Chargers): Bengals-Panthers (either team could be chosen for Saturday Week 16, creating potential rest mismatches), Browns-Giants, Saints-Bucs (could affect/be affected by whether Bucs get chosen for Saturday Week 16), Jets-Cardinals, Broncos-Raiders (would flip what’s currently a Bills rest advantage for Christmas into a Broncos advantage) (with road team approval: Colts-Titans, Falcons-Washington)
• Week 16 (Texans-Eagles): Bengals-Colts, Chargers-Dolphins (potential rest mismatch, and could create one for Chiefs-Chargers if that game gets selected for Saturday next week), Cardinals-Saints, Titans-Raiders (with road team approval: the remaining three Saturday pool games)
• Week 17 (Ravens-Bengals): Rams-Bucs (Rams have two more days of rest due to playing on Christmas, though Bucs are part of the Week 16 Saturday pool and in fact this game is part of the Week 17 Saturday pool), Saints-Falcons (Falcons are part of the Week 16 Saturday pool), Raiders-Cardinals (with road team approval: Washington-Jaguars, Seahawks-Panthers, Colts-Browns, Vikings-Jets, Steelers-Titans)

Given the apparent shift in the league’s priorities, I’m not going to mark each week as green/yellow/red as I have in recent years; instead I’m just going to use the text to assess how well the league scheduled each week in the main flex period to maximize access to the best games. The background in the right-hand column is calibrated to the median win total of each team across DraftKings and FanDuel at the time I recorded them for my fantasy schedule post. With Sunday Night Football airing the Mexico City game in Week 11, the main flex period effectively begins in Week 12 this year.

2026 Week 12 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			SEA: 6 PT SEA: W13 MNF
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/29)

Week 12: Coupled with the shift in the calendar that precludes the NFL from playing on Friday of Week 1, that means the main flex period starts with Thanksgiving and its even thinner slate of good games than in past years, and right off the bat we see how whatever changes to the league’s priorities has affected flex scheduling. On its own I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Ravens-Texans not get a featured window, but it’s hard to say it wouldn’t be more attractive than Panthers-Bucs, a battle of teams in the mediocre NFC South one of which seems poised to regress. I guess there is some value in seeing two mediocre teams face off when 9-8 could win the division, and having ten markets play earlier in the week means Ravens-Texans should get better distribution than the typical lead singleheader game, but it’s still a Tier 2/3 game that CBS won’t have any reason not to protect. As an aside, both Seahawks-Niners games are being played on Fox at 4:25 with the first round serving as an undercard for Bears-Packers Week 5 (the Niners’ first true road game of the season!); I’m not a fan of splitting up too many division rivalries and producing too many games that CBS or Fox don’t have to protect, but this is another Tier 2 matchup and you’d think you could find room to give it a primetime window at some point, even if their games toward the end of last season weren’t very interesting.

2026 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			BUF: 6 PT BUF: W12 TNF NE: W14 TNF
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/6)
			CHI: W12 Thu JAX: W14 MNF
			TB: W12 MNF
			GB: 6 PT GB: W12 Wed
			DET: W12 Thu
			CAR: W12 MNF MIN: W14 TNF

Week 13: The worst of the featured-window games is probably Texans-Steelers, a borderline Tier 6 game, while Jags-Bears is probably Tier 5, an acceptable sacrifice given the Jags’ red-headed stepchild status. Even then, though, with Bills-Patriots being another game where the rematch is on the same network, and Chargers-Bucs also falling in Tier 5, there’s a chance Texans-Steelers is only saved by the tentative game bias – the Steelers’ win total doesn’t reflect Aaron Rodgers signing up for another year with the team, but of course they finished around .500 last year with Rodgers and Mike Tomlin, so it’s not like they should be that much better. (The Steelers’ win total was 7.5 at FanDuel and 8.5 at DraftKings, while the Bucs were 8.5 in both places.) Cowboys-Seahawks is likely to also be mediocre (the Cowboys’ win total was 8.5 at FanDuel/9.5 at DraftKings and that might be inflated by their fanbase and national media attention) but, of course, Cowboys.

2026 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			KC: 6 PT KC: 13T/15M
			6-day flex
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/13)
			v. LAR: N’flix
			PHI: W15 Sat
			TNF-safe? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W15 Sat
			TNF-safe

Week 14: How bizarre is this week’s schedule? When it was leaked that Chiefs-Bengals and Rams-Niners would both be played in the afternoon this week, Rams-Niners was leaked for Fox and Chiefs-Bengals was listed for CBS, both at 4:25, implying that this would be a “double doubleheader” week when it had already been indicated that the league was returning the double DH to Week 1. That would almost make more sense than what we have here, a second NFC West showdown reduced to a 4:25 undercard, this time to an all-AFC matchup (Chiefs-Bengals was the matchup Fox highlighted as its featured game this week) and this time protected from flexing by having its other half on another network. It at least gives Fox another option if Joe Burrow is injured again or the Chiefs or Bengals disappoint, but it can’t move to Thursday or Monday as that would give the Chiefs repeat appearances on either of those days, and the Sunday night game is strong enough to be unlikely to need flexing out. Steelers-Jaguars seems like a vulnerable Monday night game on paper, with the Jaguars’ red-headed stepchild status and the potential for the Steelers to disappoint, but Fox has only one flexible game involving only teams with win totals of 7.5 or above that doesn’t involve a team playing on a day other than Sunday next week, and CBS has only one game involving only teams with win totals of 7.5 or above at all, unless you count Saints-Panthers which would hardly be an improvement over Steelers-Jaguars.

2026 Week 15 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			LAR: 7 PT
			6-day flex
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/20)
			v. JAX: NFLN
			@BAL: W18
			Both: W16 Sat?
			@NO: W18
			TNF-safe Both: W16 Sat?

Week 15: Lions-Vikings is the weakest of the featured window games, but the Vikings are still expected to be around .500 and the only decent Sunday afternoon game outside Cowboys-Rams is Jaguars-Texans, which is locked to CBS and which the league would probably never flex in anyway. With the half of Titans-Colts in Indianapolis on Fox, it’s possible the only games CBS would need to protect are Browns-Giants and Broncos-Raiders, and Browns-Giants might be safe from moving to a day other than Sunday.

2026 Week 16 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			KC: 6 PT SF: W15 TNF KC: W15 MNF
			6-day flex
2 of These Games to Saturday 12/26
			TNF-safe
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/27)
			@CLE: FOX

Week 16: Can I take a moment to gripe about the scheduling of the Thursday through Saturday games in this and the surrounding weeks? You see that the Thursday night game this week is Texans-Eagles. Well, the Eagles are scheduled to play on Saturday the previous week, but the Texans have a normal Sunday game. The other three teams playing on the previous Saturday, the Seahawks, Bears, and Bills, are all playing on Christmas against teams playing on the previous Sunday. So instead of doing what they did two years ago, or what they do for the week after Thanksgiving, and taking advantage of having multiple games on the same day to give a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday game to two teams both coming off of an early-week game, they’re doing the opposite and having all the Thursday and Friday games involve rest mismatches. And then next week the Rams, fresh off playing on Christmas, are in the Saturday pool against the Bucs, who might end up playing on Saturday. I’m working under the assumption that teams can’t play non-Sunday games in consecutive weeks even if the result is to give teams normal or even extended rest, to avoid rest mismatches in the latter of the two games, but this makes me wonder if that’s actually a thing – and makes me more sure of the Jaguars’ red-headed stepchild status, given that a non-flex of one of their games was part of what pushed me in this direction.

Anyway, the schedule for this week. It’s a good thing I suspect the Giants will outperform their win total with John Harbaugh taking over as coach, because if they end up performing closer to or worse than their win total, ESPN might be stuck with it. The potential NFL Network games include only one game between teams with win totals of at least 8.5 at at least one sportsbook, and outside Niners-Chiefs, none of the Sunday afternoon games have worse win totals better than 6.5. Neither of the Sunday afternoon games I have listed here can even move off of Sunday at all (with the caveat from the preceding paragraph in mind), and with CBS’ only other game this week involving the Patriots who are on MNF the previous week, CBS might only need to worry about protecting games from SNF. Fox’s best game, meanwhile, is probably Titans-Raiders, and at least it and Cardinals-Saints could potentially be flexed to Monday, but there’s not a team expected to be above .500 between them.

(Meanwhile, if the teams disappoint, which force will win out: “Cowboys uber alles” and the Cowboys’ general immunity from flexing, or the Jaguars’ red-headed stepchild status? The lack of decent games available for flexing might tip the scales to the former.)

2026 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Preseason | morganwick.com
			@DET: CBS
			6-day flex
2 of These Games to Saturday 1/2
			TNF-safe
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (1/3)
			@NYG: SNF
			@NO: MNF
			SEA: W16 Fri

Week 17: This week we have a strong slate of featured games with no game lower than Tier 3 or 4, and that continues into the Saturday games headlined by a borderline Tier 1 contest and a Tier 2/3 game as backup. With Rams-Bucs Tier 5, either or even both games not moving to Saturday could become their network’s best 1 PM game, even if the Sunday afternoon selections are a bit better than last week. I do consider the choice of the Packers to play on Monday night a bit eyebrow-raising considering the Tier 1 Lions-Packers matchup the following week that could decide the division and, if everyone performs as expected, the NFC’s 2 seed. With Seahawks-Rams being played the same week to potentially determine the 1 seed, making Lions-Packers off-limits to a Saturday move is a bit of a questionable decision, especially with three Saturday windows to fill this year. Swap the SNF and MNF games, and the best game you’re likely to block from Saturday is Eagles-Giants, which isn’t likely to have the same implications for both teams unless the Giants way overperform.