Assessing the 2025 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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.

As was the case last year, 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 primetime game in that week is slated for Peacock. 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 YouTube’s Brazil game does. But I couldn’t bring myself to include any indication for teams participating in Fox’s Week 16 doubleheader, even though that’s slated to involve a primetime game, because no matter what people in the league might say, I can’t get away from the notion of the purpose of the primetime appearance limits being to protect CBS and Fox first and foremost.

You’ll notice that in the post linked in the previous paragraph I quote the league’s Mike North as explicitly saying that teams can be scheduled for six primetime appearances at the start of the season, with a seventh only being possible as a result of flexing. Presumably the Chiefs starting the season with the full seven appearances has something to do with their appearance in Brazil, although pretty much every other source to break down each team’s primetime appearances gives the Chiefs credit for seven, so it’s unlikely that that game just doesn’t actually count towards the limit.

Meanwhile, Fox apparently specifically asked the league to lay off on Cowboys games in hopes of getting more games involving teams that are actually good, and while that was probably referring specifically to the 4:25 window the Cowboys are slated to make only seven Fox appearances overall. Of course, that just means that even when they aren’t expected to be very good they’re not only still slated for a full six primetime appearances, they’re the only team slated for that many appearances other than the Chiefs. Only the Chargers, of all teams, could join them as a result of being identified for a potential move to Saturday, unless you count the Eagles and Washington potentially ending up in primetime in Week 16.

On the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know why the Raiders and Giants are getting as many as three primetime appearances when neither one is expected to be any good, with both having a worse than 2-to-1 shot to make the playoffs and the Giants’ win total of 5.5 tied for the worst among any team. But that’s nothing compared to the Falcons, who get a whopping five primetime appearances – only the Chiefs and Cowboys get more – despite having the same 7.5 win total as the Cowboys (meaning they’re expected to be below .500), worse Super Bowl odds, and worse name value. Meanwhile, besides the Cowboys, another six teams have only seven appearances on their respective conference’s network, split 50-50 between AFC teams on CBS and NFC teams on Fox, meaning there’s slightly more NFC teams with seven appearances on Fox than AFC teams with seven appearances on CBS.

(Also, it’s become apparent that with the two-appearance Thursday limit, Monday night has supplanted Thursday night as the package that ends up airing a lot of teams that wouldn’t normally be considered ready for primetime, though that’s largely because of the “doubleheaders” giving them more inventory.)

On to the teams restricted from flexing into TNF:

• Multiple short-week games (can’t be flexed in without a game being flexed out): Chiefs, Cowboys, Bills, Dolphins, Lions, Ravens, Packers, Bengals, Vikings, Seahawks, Broncos, Rams
• One road short-week game (a second can only be flexed in with the team’s approval): Washington (their Christmas game comes with an extra day’s rest so I don’t count it), 49ers, Eagles (ditto for Black Friday), Steelers, Raiders, Jets, Falcons
• Completely unrestricted: Patriots, Browns, Jaguars, Texans, Colts, Titans, Chargers, Giants, Bears, Buccaneers, Panthers, Saints, 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 14 (Cowboys-Lions): Titans-Browns, Bears-Packers (only because of the Packers playing on Thanksgiving, highly unlikely), Colts-Jaguars, Saints-Bucs (would create rest mismatch for TNF the following week)
• Week 15 (Falcons-Bucs): Browns-Bears (would create rest mismatch for the Bears’ Saturday game the following week), Cardinals-Texans, Panthers-Saints, Colts-Seahawks (only because of the Seahawks playing on TNF the following week, highly unlikely), Titans-49ers (Jets-Jaguars requires road team approval; Raiders-Eagles is in a similar place but has the added issue of the Eagles playing on Monday night the previous week and creating a rest mismatch for their Saturday game the following week)
• Week 16 (Rams-Seahawks): Buccaneers-Panthers (rest mismatch due to Bucs playing on TNF the previous week), Falcons-Cardinals (only because of the Falcons playing on TNF the previous week, highly unlikely) (Chargers-Cowboys, Vikings-Giants, and Jaguars-Broncos all involve teams playing on Christmas, so flexing them in would create rest mismatches; Jets-Saints and Raiders-Texans, as well as the remaining games involving teams playing on Christmas, require road team approval)
• Week 17 (Broncos-Chiefs, assuming it’s even flexible): Patriots-Jets, Saints-Titans, Seahawks-Panthers (only because of the Seahawks playing on TNF the previous week, highly unlikely), Texans-Chargers, Giants-Raiders (Jaguars-Colts is probably off-limits due to the Colts playing on MNF the previous week)

We’ll use the same graphics as I use for the regular Flex Schedule Watch, though I should mention that I’m seriously considering moving to HTML tables to better accommodate people with screen readers, out of cautious optimism about the support WordPress’ block editor has for tables, and out of frustration over how text wrapping around the images has been handled since moving to the block editor (though I will need to spend a considerable amount of time coming up with new graphics when I’m already working on a significant retool of Cantonmetrics and other projects). The Buzzmeter is calibrated to the median win total of each team at the league’s official sportsbook partners, Caesars, DraftKings, and FanDuel, with the caveats mentioned on my fantasy schedule post. The top bar is green if the league would feel no need to flex out any games if all teams live up to expectations, yellow if it would end up flexing out a game, and red if it would want to flex out a game but can’t. No weeks have been colored red this year, but as we’ll see that comes with a major caveat.

Week 11: This should be fairly straightforward; the two best games of the week on paper are in the two flexible featured windows (the league won’t call the 4:25 window a flexible featured window but will call an audible there when needed). There’s a decently high rate of divisional matchups where the return match is in primetime, so if Lions-Eagles disappoints for whatever reason the options to replace it could be very limited. But note the iffy quality of the games in the windows that aren’t flexible at this point.

Week 12: As mentioned earlier, Monday nights have become the place where teams that might not normally be considered primetime material can have their moment in the spotlight, and this Panthers-Niners game might be worse than it looks because the Niners’ win total is high enough to qualify for Tier 1, so even if the Panthers surprise, there’s still a chance the Niners are the team that makes this game not ready for primetime if it turns out last year was the beginning of the end of their run. But one thing that became apparent last year is that Monday and Thursday night flexes can be complicated by the shift in rest disparity caused by moving a game from one night to another; you’ll notice I’ve added indications for teams that are already slated to play on a short week next week, which makes their games highly unlikely to move to Monday night even given the opportunity to, and the same goes for the two divisional matchups Fox has which is why this week is marked as green even though Fox has an early doubleheader game with a big enough advantage over the tentative to justify a flex. The league probably could have scheduled a better game for Monday night this week, but it’s not the worst game ESPN is slated to get in the flex period.

Week 13: No, that would come the following week. As mentioned earlier, I’m not entirely sure why the Giants are slated for three primetime appearances with no expectations to speak of – even with Russell Wilson I’m not sure who’s going to be lining up under center – but giving them a game in a flexible window might be the least defensible decision of the bunch, and it’s not like expectations are that high for the Patriots either. Yes, they’re big-market teams with potentially attractive quarterbacks, but we saw with the very first Monday night flex that those factors wouldn’t stop the league from flexing in a better game, and both Cardinals-Bucs and Vikings-Seahawks involve teams expected to be a full three games better than the Giants – and that’s after Thanksgiving has thinned out the Sunday slate! A part of me wonders if the league considers this game a placeholder for whichever game Fox ends up letting ESPN have down the stretch, with Giants-Pats effectively a backup option to go with big markets in the event there’s no better option, but I suspect Fox is more likely to protect Vikings-Seahawks which would leave it trapped in the late singleheader.

Week 14: Almost as surprising as Chiefs-Cowboys airing on Thanksgiving, or Washington-Eagles in Week 18, is Fox airing an all-AFC matchup as “America’s Game of the Week”, with both teams also slated for other late doubleheader windows on Fox. It used to be that Fox tried to pretend the AFC didn’t exist, and even as it’s become home to a feast of star quarterbacks the only AFC team Fox seemed to try to seek out for featured windows was the Chiefs (though they surprised me with their treatment of the Bills last year), but both the Bengals and Bills are slated for another Fox late doubleheader game on top of this. The reason? CBS has actually outpaced Fox in the ratings the last two years, suggesting the AFC’s star quarterbacks and Super Bowl contenders have started to outweigh the NFC’s historic advantage in markets, meaning teams like these are valuable enough that Fox wants to get in on the action. (I will say it’s a bit incongruous for both CBS and Fox to have feature games consisting only of teams from the other conference, which raises the question why those weeks aren’t switched. I have to surmise this has to do with CBS airing the Video Music Awards after the opening Sunday of the regular season where they’re slated to get Lions-Packers.)

Sunday and Monday nights have strong games of their own, but they won’t have any trouble replacing them if any of their teams disappoint, with Fox having three games good enough to make the graphic that aren’t flex-proof, including a divisional matchup where the return match is also slated for Fox in a window where it can’t be taken away. That can’t be said for the following week, unfortunately.

Week 15: Because make no mistake: the only reason this graphic doesn’t have a red header is because of my assumption of “Cowboys uber alles”. CBS has no fewer than three games that are Tier 3 (and depending on how you break down Denver’s games between tiers, Tier 2) or higher, two of which are divisional rematches of games whose first half is scheduled for primetime, and which includes the one Tier 1 game not scheduled for a featured window. Moving any of them to the late afternoon window isn’t much help because a) Packers-Broncos can’t be moved from that window short of a flex and b) for the second straight year, this is the double-doubleheader week, and I’ve put Packers-Broncos on the graphic because as good as it is, Fox’s lead late game, Lions-Rams, is borderline Tier 1, even if the name value is iffy. (That also means the league would likely be reticent to move Chargers-Chiefs into the late window regardless of circumstances.)

On my mock schedule I made the week after Thanksgiving the double-doubleheader week, in part because it seemed like that would make it easier to put the schedule together compared to Week 1 (at a time when I assumed ESPN would make this week a doubleheader week again), and in part so I could put Bengals-Ravens there as a game that CBS ordinarily wouldn’t consider high-value enough for the late window; had I thought of it I might have done the same with Fox’s half of Niners-Rams, though Fox seems okay with making that a lead late game regardless. There’s a reason double-doubleheaders aren’t the norm (and why the late singleheader is a purgatory the league tries to keep from having a game that’s too good in that spot): CBS and Fox want their featured game to run as unopposed as possible, and if both networks are on the air at the same time they’ll cannibalize their audiences. So I figure if there’s a game that my rules require to be placed in the lead doubleheader, but it ordinarily wouldn’t have the name value to justify that slot, put it in a double-doubleheader so the ratings expectations are depressed while the overall audience isn’t depressed too much because if the game doesn’t interest you, you can flip to the other network. Instead, the league seems to have piled a bunch of good games on CBS for the sake of inflating the first half of the doubleheader, all of which we know can support a featured window because all of them do support a featured window at various spots on the schedule, while leaving NBC stuck with a Cowboys team expected to be iffy at best. It’s a good thing CBS’ third play-by-play announcer is good enough to be on the A team at some networks.

(Having it pointed out that all three of the Ravens-Bengals games that have been trapped in the early window the last three years have specifically been the half in Cincinnati makes me wonder if the Bengals specifically request that their home game against the Ravens be played at 1 PM ET for whatever reason, as opposed to CBS not thinking Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson have enough star power to carry the late window. If so, though, no one seems to have told Burrow.)

Week 16: The league seems to have concentrated so much firepower on Fox’s Saturday doubleheader (which, incidentally, I’m probably not going to cover the order of in this feature at all) that pretty much the entire rest of the slate is mediocre at best. The best win totals of the weaker teams across all non-Saturday games is 8.5, or exactly .500. Monday night has a questionable matchup between the Niners and Colts, in a week where a bunch of games are restricted from moving to Monday with the three-game Christmas slate, and yet the Colts are expected to be okay enough that it’s not like the league would have much in the way of better options short of a team surprising anyway. If they do, though, CBS only has three games that can move to Monday (two if Baltimore can’t move later because of the possibility of their game next week moving to Saturday), while Fox has two, both of which involve teams with games in the Saturday pool (and the Falcons slated for Monday night next week, which could be a dealbreaker for the league). Speaking of which…

Week 17: The graphic has a question mark next to the number of games slated to move to Saturday because at the time I put it together, the NFL’s schedule page had leftover copy from last year’s Saturday flex that mentioned that three games would move to Saturday, and neither that page nor the PDF that came with the league’s schedule press release listed the times or networks of the Saturday games, so I wondered if the league still intended to have a third game that wasn’t being publicized or that they hoped to sell the rights to. Now, however, the schedule page claims that “two of four” games will move to Saturday (misstatement of the number of games in the Saturday pool aside), and the PDF lists the times and networks of the Saturday games, so there’s no uncertainty anymore.

Now then, this is another case where the league’s scheduling philosophy seems to have drastically shifted. Last year the highest win total of any of the weaker teams in the potential Saturday games was 6.5, so the league was really hoping that some of those teams dramatically overperformed while the Browns and Dolphins, slated to play in the Sunday nighter, didn’t underperform too much. Luckily Washington and Denver proceeded to do just that, while the Colts held up well enough to be worthy of another Saturday game, but the Browns went into a tailspin and the league had to cannibalize Washington’s game against the Falcons for Sunday night, leaving NFL Network showing a game involving a Patriots team that had already been eliminated from the playoffs when the Saturday slate was announced playing a Chargers team that was locked into the wild card.

That is not a problem this year. I don’t believe the league’s Saturday slates, since they started being subject to flex scheduling, have ever involved a game as juicy as Ravens-Packers, a Tier 2 game that, even if one or both of the teams involved massively underperform, seems unlikely to fall below CBS or Fox’s B-tier broadcast team. It’s apparent that the league wants to make sure Peacock at least has a chance to get a valuable game even as it’s now a part of the Saturday flex scheduling pool, and they aren’t taking any chances, because also part of the pool is Texans-Chargers, a Tier 3 game. Even Cardinals-Bengals is Tier 5, meaning if the teams in question perform as expected and the Saturday slate is really only a doubleheader, CBS or Fox is going to get a game good enough to send one of their top three announcer teams to, indeed to serve as CBS’ lead singleheader game (somehow all three of their currently-scheduled games involve teams with win totals of 5.5, the lowest on the board, of which there are only four total).

Despite Rams-Falcons’ expected mediocrity, I’m not tagging this as a yellow-light week because Cardinals-Bengals and Bucs-Dolphins aren’t enough better to overcome the tentative game bias, but if teams all perform as expected, the only thing stopping the league from flexing Ravens-Packers to Monday night is that for once, the NFL has a broadcast partner on its flexible Saturday slate that’s actually paying them money and has expectations of their own for the quality of game they want to get. Even then Texans-Chargers is still good enough to warrant a flex and would only degrade the quality of the game NFL Network would air, not to mention that the Sunday flexing options aren’t as limited or unappealing as last year. This is going to be an interesting situation to follow as the year progresses if the Sunday or Monday night games turn out to be weak enough to warrant a flex – Sunday night maybe more so, as NBC might be more willing to sacrifice the Peacock game to prop up the Sunday night game.