I think going forward I’m going to target Wednesday afternoon-Thursday morning for the Flex Schedule Watch unless there’s a good reason to post it earlier. Last week’s post went up on Wednesday morning, a few hours before 506sports posted its coverage maps for the week, and that produced enough backlash to how little coverage Browns-Steelers was getting compared to Ravens-Bills to spur Grok to produce a trending summary on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, when I hadn’t realized how much anticipation there was for that game. I called out how the league set itself up to be unable to pull the flex even in situations that would normally clearly call for it last week, so this week I’m going to defend the league and why it and its network partners were relatively fine with Browns-Steelers getting little coverage outside the territory of the participating teams and, weirdly, the South.
While Browns-Steelers was for first place in the AFC North, stakes and actual good teams don’t drive ratings nearly as much as brands and stars. Last year’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game was the Super Bowl rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs, way back in Week 2, followed by the modern Brady-Manning rivalry between the Chiefs and Bills; the 6-11 Chiefs played in four of the five most-watched games of the year. The most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game not to involve the Chiefs was Eagles-Bills Week 17, pitting a big market against Josh Allen. NBC’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving game by Nielsen standards was the Kickoff Game between the Eagles and the almighty Cowboys, while its most-watched Sunday night game was the Lions and Chiefs in Week 6, two teams that ultimately missed the playoffs; that and Bears-Niners Week 17 were the only Sunday night games to outpace Packers-Cowboys Week 4. As much as I defended the decision to give the Sunday night slot Week 18 to Ravens-Steelers over Seahawks-49ers, the latter game earned more viewers for ESPN and ABC than any Sunday night game last year, and two million more than Ravens-Steelers; the most watched Monday night game was a Week 3 contest between the Ravens and Lions, again, two non-playoff teams. Outside of Christmas, Amazon’s most-watched regular season game of the year was the week-after-Thanksgiving game between the Cowboys and Lions. The same teams crop up again and again at the top of each package’s list of most-watched games, and there isn’t that much of a correlation with the best teams or even teams that made the playoffs.
All of which means that, for all the brouhaha over flexible scheduling, if you simply divvied up the games between the teams with the biggest fanbases across the league’s marquee windows, the TV partners would probably be fine without any flexing. Even with both teams having mediocre-at-best seasons, if you hooked up NBC executives to truth serum, they’d tell you they’d much prefer to have Eagles-Quinns over Browns-Steelers. As for CBS, last year I made the point that every game has value to CBS and Fox even if they’re buried on the depth chart, but you might still think that swapping out Browns-Steelers for Eagles-Quinns would be a net positive… but putting Washington in the 1 PM window wouldn’t add as many viewers as you might think given the considerable crossover of fanbases for each other’s teams in the Baltimore and Washington markets. You’d have to either put it at 4:25 as an undercard to Chiefs-Broncos, or put it on Fox and engage in some crossflexing. That’s not even getting into how having Ravens-Bills and Browns-Steelers on the same network at the same time helps YouTube to sell Sunday Ticket. A less valuable game, or even one not involving Washington, might well have seen CBS be willing to relinquish Browns-Steelers, but the networks are more than fine with the way things played out.
Would the league prefer to showcase potential future playoff teams than continue to shove the NFC East down viewers’ throats even as it looks like it might be the NFC Least? Sure, but even then there might be some within the league that are relieved that they didn’t create a national showcase for DeShaun Watson and all his controversy in the middle of the season where one wasn’t pre-scheduled. Frankly, I still don’t quite believe there was any real clamor for a Week 8 game between the Browns and Steelers, division lead on the line or no, to get a national audience. As I mentioned last week, the real problem is that the hype surrounding flex scheduling creates expectations for which games are given national audiences that doesn’t align with the reality of what the networks value. The league may have had to lay in the bed that it made, but ultimately, this was the schedule it wanted and it’s the schedule it got, with or without the Browns outperforming expectations.
(A brief note before we begin: I’m not covering Week 11 because the Sunday night game that week is from Mexico City and not flexible even if the teams involved didn’t have two losses between them, but there’s a very real possibility that CBS bails out of Steelers-Eagles as its lead late game. At this point, though, if it happens I fully expect them to promote Raiders-Broncos to the lead spot, even if the Raiders lose this week, if only because it wouldn’t require asking the league to move any games around, and it totally doesn’t have anything to do with their best early game, Jaguars-Giants, involving the Anti-Cowboys.)
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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
- No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven 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, and no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
- 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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.