Morgan Wick

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

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Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game, except in this opening section.

On Thursday Lamar Jackson made his triumphant return under center for the Ravens as they walloped the spiraling Dolphins 28-6, with the team picking up twice as many wins over the last five days as they had the entire season up to that point. It’s given them a good enough record that their games will qualify for being flex candidates on next week’s post, but it’s also weirdly unsurprising. Even when the Ravens were sitting at 1-5 and staring at what would ordinarily be daunting odds of making the playoffs, it was hard to write them off entirely. The Ravens faced a daunting first quarter of the season with three of their first four games coming against not only playoff teams but legitimate Super Bowl contenders, and right when their schedule looked like it might start getting easier, Jackson went down and the Ravens found themselves getting blown out by the mediocre Texans. The Bills’ struggles (getting outplayed by the Patriots at home and losing to the mediocre Falcons) have made it look like even the full-strength Ravens aren’t as good as we’re used to, but there was always reason to think that, when healthy, the Ravens were substantially better than 1-5 made them look.

And now that they’ve cleared that early season gauntlet, the path might be clear for them to make the playoffs. The Browns are still the Browns and the Bengals are going through yet another season from hell without Joe Burrow, leaving the Steelers as the only other respectable team in the division, and they haven’t been performing as well as you’d like either. The Ravens entered the week only two games back of the division lead with both Steelers games still to play, and their respective schedules go in very different directions. The Steelers have only one game against a team with a losing record that isn’t in their division the rest of the season, while the Ravens face only two teams with winning records that aren’t the Steelers: the Patriots Week 16 and the Packers Week 17.

Unfortunately, that means they won’t be much help for flex scheduling windows that otherwise find themselves lacking in options – especially since the second Steelers game is Week 18, which also means the first game in Week 14 probably can’t be flexed away from CBS in a week they have the singleheader (and where they already have another flex-immune potentially-division-deciding game in Colts-Jaguars). Ravens-Patriots falls in the one week that doesn’t need the help to provide flexing options, although if it comes down to that game or Jaguars-Broncos I think Ravens-Patriots would get the nod on name value all else being equal (although Jaguars-Broncos being a late singleheader game could counteract that).

But the broadcaster hoping the hardest to see a Ravens winning streak would be, of all things, Peacock. When the schedule was announced it looked like the league had made a big splash with its Saturday Week 17 games with multiple games pitting teams expected to have winning records coinciding with Peacock picking up the rights to one of the games, with the centerpiece being Ravens-Packers, a Tier 2 game that any of the networks would be proud to have in one of their regular marquee windows. Those games have almost all disappointed, and the only Saturday-eligible game pitting two teams at or above .500 at the moment is Seahawks-Panthers, a game that wasn’t expected to be particularly good. If the Ravens make a push for the playoffs, Peacock’s original vision of getting a game between marquee teams with playoff implications in primetime is back on the table, with Seahawks-Panthers or Texans-Chargers providing a more than suitable undercard game for NFL Network.

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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Introducing Cantonmetrics 2.0

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Over the course of the past week, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the figures to advance to the next stage of consideration in all four of the categories from which people can potentially be inducted into Canton, which makes it as good a time as any to roll out the next evolution of the Cantonmetrics feature.

The main change is that the charts that have made up the Cantonmetrics posts in the past can now be found on a searchable Google spreadsheet, which can be found HERE.

In addition to dynamically updating the lists of retired players, coaches, and contributors after each cutdown announcement, as well as the list of active players after each season is complete, the spreadsheet also contains tabs for the All-Snub Team and my attempt to track the contenders for the All-Decade Team of the 2020s. In addition to the metrics already being tracked and the Hall of Fame Monitor, all tabs now contain the Legends Score, an attempt to measure players based on postseason honors only based on a measure devised by the Future Football Legends website, but which I’ve made some adjustments to. I expect to make more changes, adjustments, and improvements next offseason as well.

This page contains more information about how to read the spreadsheet as well as a general introduction to the concept of Cantonmetrics, and I’m adding a link to the top bar as well. I may decide to embed the spreadsheet directly onto a static page, but I’m not sure exactly what to include on it to justify the separate existence of the introduction page, if in fact I need to justify not simply placing it on there to begin with.

After the jump, some thoughts about this particular round of cuts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

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What does flexible scheduling mean for Monday and Thursday Night Football, particularly when it comes to how the league sees them?

Historically, ESPN’s package was considered the secondary primetime package getting games of somewhat questionable quality, while Thursday nights were a tertiary package hobbled by the need to show every team exactly once to balance out everyone’s short weeks. The NFL has attempted to improve the quality of the games both packages have gotten over the last decade; during the “broadcast-network-and-NFLN-simulcast” era for TNF (during a time when the league’s relationship with ESPN was… not great) it regularly rated ahead of MNF in simulcast weeks and the league treated it accordingly, giving it games as good as the restrictions on the package allowed for, and since Jimmy Pitaro has taken the helm at ESPN and started simulcasting MNF games on ABC, and especially since the new TV deal that gives ABC and ESPN Super Bowls, the league has started giving them better games as well, including last year’s Super Bowl rematch between the Niners and Chiefs. This year ESPN got two Tier 1 games, Lions-Ravens and Washington-Chiefs, the latter of which was also identified as one of the most coveted games for TV partners by the posters on the 506sports Discord. But NBC, CBS, and Fox each got at least three Tier 1 games and at least three coveted games, and Amazon didn’t get any game in either category.

Part of what holds Monday and Thursday nights back is how many games of each team they’re able to air. Since the start of the new TV deals, no team has been scheduled for more than two games on either package at the start of the year, and we know no team can play more than two in the case of Thursday nights. NBC, by contrast, regularly has teams scheduled for as many as three games at the start of the year, and even before the expansion of the season could have teams flexed in for a fourth. ESPN is further constricted by their “doubleheaders” giving them more games than the other primetime package and requiring them to show games involving more teams, making them the package of last resort for teams with only one primetime appearance, not TNF like it used to be. This all has the effect of limiting how many good games each package can air and increasing the chance that each package will show games involving teams of questionable quality, even if the days of the Jags and Titans squaring off in the Tank Bowl on TNF are in the past. And while both packages are getting better games, and more good games, than they used to, they’re still mixed in with a number of games that wouldn’t be caught dead on SNF or as the lead late doubleheader game.

So what are the league’s expectations for those packages in light of the expansion of flex scheduling to them? Flexible scheduling brings with it the expectation that there’s a level of quality the league doesn’t want the packages to fall below, but that’s not necessarily the level that the league schedules them for. Both packages have had games scheduled for flexible windows that seemed to be of questionable quality when the schedule came out, though ESPN more so than Amazon; both last year and this year, the Monday after Thanksgiving got its week tagged as a “yellow light” week as a week where the league might pull the flex if every team involved played exactly as expected, and last year each package also contributed to identifying a “red light” week where the league would want to pull a flex but couldn’t because of the additional protections CBS and Fox got in the new TV deals. So far, no SNF game has been expected to be the worst flexible game in a week I tagged as “yellow light” or “red light”. So is the league okay with continuing to schedule questionable games for Monday and Thursday nights despite the expansion of flex scheduling to them? But what to make of those “yellow light” weeks where, based on the expectations surrounding the teams when the schedule comes out, the league would already be expected to flex out of their own game?

Worth noting that last year’s “yellow light” game ended up not being flexed out (much to my surprise), and this year’s game seems unlikely to be flexed out either. In both cases, the reason may have to do with how changing the date a game is played affects the amount of rest teams get, which may be the main factor preventing flexible scheduling from raising the level of Monday and Thursday nights too much, besides the restrictions on the number of times teams can play on each night. Teams obviously can’t play Thursday night games immediately following Monday night games (Sunday-to-Thursday jumps are bad enough), and teams playing on Monday or Thursday nights in consecutive weeks are probably something the league wants to avoid in general because of the rest mismatches they create. Even Monday night games after Thursday games might be a bridge too far for the league, exacerbating the rest mismatch that already exists the week after a Thursday game.

All of this may be coming to a head when it comes to the Miami Dolphins, starting the season 1-6 and in an absolute tailspin with people wondering why head coach Mike McDaniel hasn’t been fired yet. The Dolphins are scheduled for a Week 15 Monday night clash with Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, in a week where I was already worried about the number of marquee games unable to be flexed due to being divisional matchups with rematches on the wrong network. But if the game were the Sunday nighter, as will be the case for the Dolphins the following week, it could be flexed out no problem, with the Colts successfully “playing their way into primetime”. On Monday night, the game not only has to deal with not shortening anyone’s rest for the following week’s Thursday game, but the two games Fox has scheduled for the following Saturday. That means ESPN’s options for replacing it are very limited, and it’s not clear that the options they do have are any better.

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 6

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

It’s time for another year of the Flex Schedule Watch, and as I alluded to in May I’m rolling out new HTML tables for the weekly display of games, even though two of the reasons I cited back then didn’t pan out. WordPress technically has a dedicated block for tables, but it also hijacks a lot of the HTML behind them, replaces some functions with its own custom code, and rejects some perfectly valid HTML if it doesn’t do things the way it wants to, which wouldn’t be quite so bad if the formatting options below the level of the entire table weren’t so limited. On its own, that would be enough to lead me to use a “custom HTML” block for the tables. The resulting table is narrow enough that I decided I wanted to have the body text wrap around it, and to avoid running into the same problem that frustrated me with the old graphics I ended up resorting to exploiting code WordPress normally only uses to support the classic editor. That could have allowed me to keep the table without resorting to the classic editor for the rest of the post, but the table is also wide enough that the text can’t squeeze in between the tables, and WordPress hijacks the HTML that would normally force the body text below any tables on the same side and I don’t know if it even has its own way of doing that, so classic editor it is.

Still, the point about screen readers remains valid, and this format allows me to include more and more descriptive notes, which is important when considering how complex and overlapping all the different factors I wanted to cover there were becoming – see the places where I noted Thursday or Monday night games in preceding or following weeks on the May post. (The main factor that convinced me to stick with this format and not go back to the previous format was just how difficult it was going to be to keep track of everything in Weeks 15 and 16 in particular. If I do ditch this format, I may still change how the weekly graphics look compared to last year.) Beyond that, I want to see how hard or easy, or fun, this will be to maintain compared to the previous system. Getting the graphics from the last couple of years to look the way I want in Excel was harder than it looked, because of a confluence of factors involving how Excel supports pictures and other visual elements that aren’t part of the cells themselves, as well as how varying border widths affects the whole spreadsheet. (Last year’s Week 15 graphics, which started with three rows of flexible windows instead of two, had to be worked on on an entirely separate set of rows from the rest of the graphics.)

This does mean I’ll have to update the team records and equivalent of the Buzzmeter manually, though, which could result in this approach taking longer than the previous system, but I could still end up deciding it’s worth it if I enjoy it more than wrestling with Excel, especially since I did something similar before with the Playoff Pictures – although it might not be a good sign that I’m probably still going to use static images for those. (Also, I’ve seriously been considering not ordering the flex candidates by quality and instead ordering them according to the order they’re in on the NFL web site, freeing me from having to copy-and-paste rows manually.) Ultimately, I consider this an experiment in whether this approach will work going forward, though I’m already not optimistic. Still, I went to all the trouble to put together new team-logo graphics and even graphics for each individual featured window, so I might as well get some use out of them.

Speaking of the Buzzmeter, because of the limitations of HTML – as, to my knowledge, I can’t crop an image with HTML alone – what I’ve done is color the background of the notes section from red to yellow to green based on the record of the worse team in each game. I was going to put a colored circle between the teams but it wasn’t big enough for the color to stand out. I’m still not completely happy with this, though, and I might end up deciding to add a blank column, either between the teams, on the far left side, or between the timeslot/broadcaster logo and the team logos. I welcome any input you might have as to what might work best.

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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Cantonmetrics: 2026 Preliminary Nominees

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Offseason Snapshot

Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction.

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Diagnosing Democracy, Part III: The Party’s Over, Now Let’s Get It Right This Time

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A year ago I read an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch celebrating that Joe Biden being forced out of the Democratic nomination represented the reassertion of the principle that “nominations belong to parties, not to candidates”. Rauch argued that “for most of U.S. history…Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life”, nurturing and directing politicians and ultimately controlling who ran for office on their ticket, from President all the way down to dog catcher, from the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”.

Contrary to popular belief, the decision-makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests…And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates…Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt – traits no one wants to go back to – they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths.

By 2016, however, in a process started when the Democrats put more weight on the primary process following the contentious 1968 nomination fight – which initially resulted in George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, leading to party insiders clawing back influence in the “invisible primary” – “the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless and corrupt intermediaries at worst”. In Rauch’s telling, the revelation in the hacked DNC e-mails of the party putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders would, in times past, have gotten a shrug: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!” While the Republican Party has effectively become a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, the Democrats continue to exert influence over the nomination, lining up behind Biden in 2020 and forcing him off the ticket in ’24, showing that “both man and party” can “put the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.”

Rauch argues that the weakening of the role of party professionals has fueled our present-day dysfunction, creating bitter divisions between factions that put furthering their ideology ahead of the national interest. Americans may “have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands”, but the demonstration that “a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture” can point the way forward. Our democracy, in Rauch’s telling, worked because party bosses had the perspective to ignore the screeching of ideologues and choose the candidate that could best appeal to the broadest cross-section of the electorate, that could actually win an election.

You know, like when they stopped Sanders from dooming the party to certain defeat and chose Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, as the best choice to win the election, as opposed to the Republicans who fell victim to the Trump insurgency that would surely doom them in November.

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Wither the Linear Cable Network?

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On Monday, three years after WarnerMedia was spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery, the company announced that it was splitting back apart. WBD will split into a “Streaming and Studios” company consisting of the various studios, mostly Warner Bros-branded but also including DC Studios, as well as HBO and the streaming service about to be re-renamed back to HBO Max, and a “Global Networks” company with all of the current WBD’s non-HBO linear networks as well as the discovery+ streaming service.

This comes on the heels of Comcast announcing its plans to split off most of its linear cable networks (except Bravo) to a new company to be called Versant, and it might seem like WBD is playing follow-the-leader, splitting off everything that’s not actively contributing to its streaming business to get its fading linear cable businesses off the books. But there are some key differences. Most of the networks Comcast is spinning off don’t really provide much value on their own; USA airs sports content but most of it was purchased by NBCUniversal, usually with NBCSN being the originally intended cable outlet, and will now effectively be sublicensed out to Versant, and NBCU’s most recent major sports rights deals with the Big Ten and NBA have left out USA entirely in favor of signing rights for the NBC broadcast network and Peacock alone. Very few Versant outlets air much in the way of truly original programming, at least outside cheap true crime documentaries; the main outlets producing real value on their own would probably be CNBC and MSNBC.

That is not the case with the WBD split. While Comcast is keeping all of NBC Universal’s sports rights, the sports rights WBD holds under the TNT and Eurosport banners will be going with the “Global Networks” division, which I’ll be referring to as “Turner Discovery” for the rest of this post while referring to “Streaming and Studios” as “Warner Bros.” CNN is still a going concern and arguably still a stronger news brand than MSNBC, plus there’s all the documentary and reality programming from the Discovery networks and kids’ and other animated programming on Cartoon Network. (In fact, there’s an open question as to whether or not Cartoon Network will really be separated from the studio that effectively produces all of its programming – and it’s an especially pressing question at Adult Swim, which effectively is Williams Street, the studio that not only produces all of its original programming but runs the network/block.) All of this would be valuable content for any streaming service; indeed, Turner Discovery will not only be coming with an existing streaming service in discovery+, but is working on a new one for CNN.

The problem is, though, it hasn’t added that much value to Max. WBD chair David Zaslav has admitted that sports has not been a major driver of Max sign-ups (unlike with Peacock), and Max’s failure to gain traction in the kids-and-family space has raised questions about the future of Cartoon Network more generally and led them to not only strip Max of most kids’ content in favor of continuing to license to outside streamers, but increasingly, to produce new kids’ series for those streamers as well. The rebrand back to HBO Max is effectively an admission that the one thing that actually has provided value to the service has been the sort of prestige TV and movies that have long been HBO’s bread and butter, and this split is effectively an announcement that WarnerMedia intends to focus the service on those things nigh-exclusively.

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Assessing the 2025 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This year’s NFL schedule seemed to represent a shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy, going bigger in windows where you wouldn’t normally expect them to. Part of that has to do with how many teams the league has that are both good and popular, and how many of those teams play each other, thanks to the NFC East (the most popular, iconic division in football with the defending champions, the reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the single most popular team) being slated to play the NFC North (the next most popular, iconic division in football) and the AFC West (and the always-popular Chiefs plus young star quarterbacks on two other teams). The end result was that almost all the most valuable games to the TV partners were either Tier 1 or involved the Cowboys (who aren’t expected to be very good), with Packers-Steelers (and its potential matchup of Aaron Rodgers against his former team) being the only game outside those categories to be named more than once when I asked the 506sports Discord what the most valuable games were.

Mike North told CBS’ Jonathan Jones that this bounty of high-value games emboldened the league to schedule bigger in its marquee windows, but I never in a million years would have expected the league to schedule Chiefs-Cowboys, probably the two most popular teams in the league right now, on Thanksgiving, when the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game is usually the most popular regular season game of the entire year even when the opponent sucks. Normally you’d expect a game like that to provide a boon to one of the broadcast partners in a regular Sunday afternoon or primetime window, but the league seems to be coming out guns blazing to try and set the record for the most watched regular season game of all time.

Meanwhile, I don’t believe the league has ever scheduled a Tier 1 game for the final week of the regular season when there weren’t three Tier 1-worthy teams in the same division, so I thought for sure they would put the old “Cowboys-Indians” rivalry there despite being the most iconic rivalry involving the league’s most iconic team (after all, it has ended up in the final week before), but no: if form holds the top two teams in the NFC East will have an NFC Championship rematch at the site where that game was played in Week 18, potentially for the division title. (At the other end of the season, though, I wouldn’t put the decision to make the Cowboys Philadelphia’s Opening Night opponent in this category; contrary to popular belief there isn’t really any evidence that the league shies away from marquee games for Opening Night, though I don’t think they’ve gone for the biggest game of the entire year there.)

But this shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy doesn’t seem to have brought with it much of an improvement in how the league schedules 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 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, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I’ve come to realize 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.

(I should note that the division rivalry rule does have some wiggle room, even beyond North’s comments from last year. After all of last year’s Week 18 games were rematches of games slated for the “proper” network, this year Browns-Bengals is scheduled for Week 18 with the game in Cleveland on Fox, and after what happened to Texans-Colts two years ago I’m not going to assume it’s off-limits to a move to NBC or ESPN. More surprisingly, the Cardinals and Seahawks are slated to have one meeting on CBS and the other on a Thursday night, and those are two teams expected to be around .500 so that matchup might be just good enough for Tier 6. But I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that those cases both have one matchup on the other conference’s network, and they aren’t so high-powered that it’s implausible for CBS and Fox to approve of those moves. I don’t think it means the league has the freedom to flex in division-rivalry games or that CBS and Fox have to protect them if they’re rematches of games on another network, given we have firm evidence otherwise. Not that the league can’t flex in such games – see the link above – but it needs to be worth CBS or Fox’s while.)

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 (including those teams playing on Christmas, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.

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What the 2025 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Wednesday, and as I did last year, 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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Where Will the NFL Draft Go Next?

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Earlier this year the NFL announced what had been widely expected: the 2026 draft will be held in Pittsburgh, PA. Then on Monday the league announced that the 2027 draft would be held in Washington, DC, on the National Mall. Besides being home to storied franchises with strong fanbases, these sites all have something in common with most post-pandemic draft sites:

Since the pandemic, drafts have been hosted in Cleveland, Las Vegas, Detroit, Kansas City, and Green Bay. Of these, only Las Vegas and Detroit have hosted Super Bowls, and only Las Vegas, which received the 2022 Draft as consolation for losing the 2020 Draft to the pandemic, is likely to host a Super Bowl in the future. Before the pandemic, the 2019 Draft was held in Nashville, and before that, the 2018 Draft was held at Jerryworld in Arlington, whose turn hosting Super Bowl XLV was enough of a disaster to seemingly turn the league off to bringing the Big Game back there. Go back further and you end up at the first three drafts to be held after hitting the road and leaving New York, Chicago twice and Philadelphia once – once again, cities unlikely to hold the Super Bowl anytime soon. Since leaving New York in 2015, no city that has hosted more than two Super Bowls has hosted the Draft.

This greatly clarifies which cities might have a shot at hosting the draft in the future. Cities that are regular Super Bowl hosts are probably very low priorities, but the league will also want to travel to as many different cities as possible before re-using cities. Cities with storied franchises and strong fan bases are also probably high on the list of priorities. And it’s also a good idea to have space for not only the draft stage itself (along with the many people trying to watch), but also for various auxiliary activities surrounding the draft, which can take up many times more space than the actual draft stage. Detroit managed to host the draft in a small, awkwardly shaped space where there’s mostly parking and parks, so the league will find a way if it needs to, but the logistics of it, as well as whether or not the draft can be held near a local landmark or with a picturesque backdrop, will still be factors differentiating cities with similar credentials.

I’ve ranked all 30 NFL cities based on how likely I think they are to host the draft in the near future, based on these factors and others. This is a very approximate ranking and shouldn’t be taken to point to who I think will host the 2028 Draft or any other particular future draft. Rather, these are the sites that I think are worth watching and which I think the league will go to in the future. (This post took long enough to put together that it cut into the time I have to put together a mock schedule for this season, so I hope it’s worth it.) Without further ado, let us begin.

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