Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 8 Flex Scheduling Decisions

Week 8 (SNF early flex #1): Earlier this week the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe reported that the NFL was considering flexing out Eagles-Quinns from the Week 8 Sunday Night Football slot. While I briefly considered starting the full-size Flex Schedule Watch a week earlier than planned to accommodate this, ultimately I was content to let this serve as the extent of my analysis:

This is where the NFL flex scheduling rules suck CBS automatically gets to protect Chiefs/Broncos and Browns/Steelers because the first game did not air on their network, so it can’t be that FOX automatically gets to protect Lions/Vikings because the second game is on SNF and won’t air on their network, so it can’t be that CBS will protect Bills/Ravens as their one game FOX will protect Jets/Raiders as their one game That means you’re stuck with only 6 possible options for the flex, where of those 6, the best option is Colts vs Jaguars, and spoiler alert, they’re not flexing out an NFC East rivalry for Colts/Jags There are way too many protections baked in

— JaguarGator9 (@JaguarGator9NFL) October 13, 2026

2026 Week 8 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 (except MNF) | morganwick.com
	5-0	4-2	@KC: MNF KC: 6 PT
	2-4	1-3-1
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/1)
	4-2	5-1	BUF: 6 PT
	4-2	4-2	@CLE: TNF
	5-0	3-2	@MIN: SNF
	2-4	4-2	@IND: W18
	3-3	2-4
	2-4	2-4	DAL: 6 PT

Then the Eagles announced that Jalen Hurts would undergo a procedure to treat a blood clot in his leg, which ultimately resulted in the team placing him on injured reserve, meaning he’ll miss at least the next three weeks, including not only this game but other divisional matchups in the previous and following weeks, and according to some analyses will only return if the clot completely goes away. The NFC East is in one of their “NFC Least” seasons, so it’s hard to write anyone off too early (although there’s a real possibility of the Giants running away from everyone else), but it’s certainly looking like, coupled with everything else that’s happened to the Eagles this season, this is turning into a “season from hell” where everything goes wrong for an otherwise good team and they find themselves out of the playoff picture. And they aren’t even the worse team in the game! (Though they might have been if Washington didn’t bungle the end of OT against the Giants and somehow pulled off the upset against the Niners tonight.)

Despite this, I’m not sure it changes the larger analysis given all the constraints involved. But this is where I have to bring up the elephant in the living room: the decision when the schedule was made to make Ravens-Bills, a Tier 1 game I would have thought was one of the more coveted games by the TV partners, a lead early doubleheader game. Back in May I said that one of the saving graces of that decision was that it didn’t fall in the main flex period, but I also raised my eyebrow at the density of divisional games with rematches on other networks that CBS and Fox wouldn’t have to protect given that the Sunday night game involved a Washington team that, even then, was expected to be mediocre. The NFL clearly wanted to not only prop up the early doubleheader window, but arrange things to maximize the likelihood that the marquee game stayed there, with a rematch of a game on another network involving the almighty Chiefs in the late window and other divisional rematches elsewhere on the schedule – except give NBC a game with as low a likelihood as possible of warranting a flex in the first place. Now that seems to have bitten them in the backside, and demonstrated why scheduling that way, even in the early flex period, is probably a bad idea.

Were this not an NFC East matchup, I would say that the league would flex its muscle and veto CBS from protecting Ravens-Bills for the good of the league. As it stands, even though these might be the two worse NFC East teams by the end of the season and neither of them are the almighty Cowboys, it’s still an NFC East game, and the league might still think the fanbases are large enough to justify letting NBC keep the game, or at least that, even with Tanner McKee at the helm of the Eagles, the situation isn’t dire enough for the league to override its own rules and piss off CBS. That would leave the league with games involving 2-4 teams as its only options, and leaving aside the Jaguars’ status as the Anti-Cowboys, it’s not clear the league even could flex in Colts-Jaguars since the rematch is in Week 18 and could be desired for a Saturday window. One place I might have quibbled with the tweet above was the possibility of Fox protecting Cardinals-Cowboys instead of Raiders-Jets, even though the Cardinals aren’t very good and seemingly gave up on the season with last week’s Marvin Harrison Jr. trade, and with the Cardinals winning and Jets losing I definitely think that’s the game they’d protect (with a caveat I’ll get into in this week’s main Flex Schedule Watch post). But even then, would either game be enough of an upgrade over Eagles-Quinns?

An intriguing possibility could be if the league convinces CBS to let NBC have Browns-Steelers, which on paper, would be valuable to CBS as it would allow two AFC North markets to see Ravens-Bills (a game involving an archrival to both markets) that otherwise wouldn’t, but that might be outweighed by having games involving teams in the close-proximity Baltimore and Washington markets on the same network at the same time, meaning viewers in one market that are fans of the team in the other one would be blacked out unless Eagles-Quinns went to Fox. I think that if the league decides that this is a situation warranting breaking their own rules and overriding a protection, it’ll be to bring in Ravens-Bills, effectively serving as a mea culpa for the decision to put it in the early doubleheader. But if I had to guess, I don’t think it’ll happen. Besides, there’s still another potential early flex looming. Final prediction: no changes.