NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

On Sunday the Seahawks and Rams will square off in a game to determine not only the lead in the NFC West, but at minimum, no worse than a tie for the best record in the NFC. Multiple figures have been declaring it not only the game of the week but potentially the game of the year… and it’s trapped on the late singleheader. Its distribution outside the West Coast is a bit broader than simply the home markets of teams playing on CBS in the early window – also covering most of the secondary markets of those teams, or at least the ones in the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Buffalo axis – but probably the majority of unaligned markets will get Bears-Vikings in the early window.

Suffice to say, the Seahawks were not expected to be this good. Back in May, their win totals at sportsbooks was around 8.5 or even 7.5, so expectations were for them to finish around or even below .500, despite narrowly missing out on the playoffs and adding Sam Darnold coming off a near-MVP-level campaign. That was good enough for their games to qualify as Tier 6, but when I put together a graphic for the week’s games after the schedule came out, this game didn’t even crack the top four games not slated for featured windows, with Niners-Cardinals getting the nod for recognition on the graphic – in large part because Seahawks-Rams wasn’t going to be available for flexing (more on that later, and more info on my thoughts on the schedule release in general in the list-of-primetime-appearances count link below). But the question seemed to be moot, because the two best games of the week seemed to be in flexible featured windows – Tier 2 Chiefs-Broncos and Tier 1 Lions-Eagles – so there didn’t seem to be a need for flexing anyway.

I did warn that there was a decently high rate of divisional games that week that had rematches in primetime and couldn’t be flexed in, with Chiefs-Broncos, Bears-Vikings, and Bengals-Steelers specifically being noted as such in the graphic. But even at the time, Seahawks-Rams stung the most, because a high-profile game on the singleheader network is bad enough without it being in the late window. The NFL seems to prioritize high-profile games not being stuck on the late singleheader, once even “overriding” an existing protection on such a game to move it to primetime. Late singleheader games are limited in distribution to protect the main late doubleheader game, never crossing the 50% mark and rarely if ever even being the singleheader network’s highest-distributed game, though a late singleheader game getting the network’s A team does happen. The only real way to prevent a high-profile divisional matchup that can’t be flexed from being trapped on the late singleheader is for every West Coast game where the other half falls in primetime to fall in a doubleheader week for its respective network, and not only is that likely to be impractical, the networks and league probably don’t even want it if it dilutes the distribution for the main late game.

Of course, this raises the question of why this game was selected for primetime to begin with if the networks don’t believe in it, and whether we’re really missing out on the game of the year if these two teams will play again later in primetime – especially since I think the Rams are the better team (Seattle spent the last two weeks beating up on mediocre-at-best teams, whoop-de-do) so the rematch in Seattle should be more competitive than this game. The answer is that the rematch between these two teams is slated for Thursday Night Football, and TNF is still the primetime package with a greater diversity of teams featured (though not necessarily as much as MNF in the “doubleheader” era) at the expense of the quality of the game. It also means the rematch isn’t going to have that big an audience given the restriction of needing Prime Video to watch the game outside of the home markets of the teams playing.

Of course, the league, on paper, thinks enough of TNF and MNF to give them flex scheduling in the new contract, but as I mentioned a few weeks back I’m not entirely sure what that actually means for them, given the difficulties in flexing games to those nights. Week 11 was a big reason for that: I raised the question of the “iffy quality” of the games in those windows back in May and those worries played out to an even greater extent than was evident back then, with me spending several weeks commenting that Week 11 barely even felt like a flex scheduling week with the Thursday night game involving the woeful Jets and Monday night involving the forgettable Raiders. If you asked people what featured-window game they’d bump out for Seahawks-Rams, they might be forced to realize that Chiefs-Broncos and Lions-Eagles are still important marquee games in their own right. What makes the Seahawks-Rams situation so offensive is the offensive quality of the games on Thursday and Monday. The league may or may not see flex scheduling as meaning much to those windows, and they may or may not see them as worthy of putting decent games on for more than a handful of weeks a season, but maybe they should. Maybe the approach that treats those windows as a dumping ground should, at minimum, be throttled back around the middle of the season, a few weeks before the flex scheduling windows open for them. There are limits to how good their schedule can be top-to-bottom, but this is the part of the schedule where having bad games there hurts the most.

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.

2025 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 10 | morganwick.com
	6-3	5-4
	8-2	3-7
	2-8	8-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/30)
	7-2	5-5	CAR: W12 MNF
	4-5	7-2
	4-5	8-2	@HOU: W18

Week 13: The Giants have only lost one game against a team with a losing record since Jaxson Dart became their starter, but they’re trotting out Jameis Winston against the Patriots after firing their coach and time has run out to try and stave off a flex. That doesn’t mean the game will be flexed out, though; it’s still two big Northeastern markets, Dart is still an appealing story, and it’s still an open question whether the league even has a game to flex in.

Giving a team consecutive Monday night games by flexing in a game in the second of the two weeks is more acceptable than the reverse because it doesn’t change the rest mismatch, just the total amount of rest for both teams, but I suspect it was probably still a bridge too far for the league in Week 13 last year, which could put Rams-Panthers off-limits for a Monday move. That would leave Vikings-Seahawks and Bills-Steelers as the only Sunday afternoon games that can move to Monday night and can pit two teams with records of .500 or better, which also makes them the obvious choices for CBS and Fox to protect. But that’s where the Washington football team comes in. With Jayden Daniels routinely getting hurt, their record is only a game better than that of the Giants, and over the past few weeks I’ve raised the possibility of the league using the threat of flexing Rams-Panthers into Sunday night to get Fox to protect it and leave Vikings-Seahawks available for Monday night.

The league would much prefer to flex in Vikings-Seahawks not only because of the name value and the storyline of Sam Darnold facing the team he carried to the playoffs last year, and because the Vikings are probably a better team than the Panthers despite their records, but because it would be trapped in the late singleheader window otherwise. But for the same reasons, Fox might be inclined to protect the game even if a Sunday night flex is in play, and it might not be enticing enough to force Fox to leave it unprotected. One reason the league is willing to put up with situations like Seahawks-Rams this week is that even the late singleheader shouldn’t be stuck with completely terrible games, since they’re going to be shown to the home markets of teams playing in the early doubleheader, though that’s not going to mean much in either of these weeks. Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible that all things considered, if Vikings-Seahawks is available the league still decides to flex it into Sunday night; Sunday night is still the more important primetime package, Giants-Patriots still pits two big markets, and as this article points out, moving games across days is especially dicey on Thanksgiving weekend when everyone is already juggling travel plans. (On the other hand, the article never mentions Rams-Panthers and considers Texans-Colts a realistic possibility without reckoning with the rematch in Week 18 potentially disqualifying it.)

Can Fox be convinced to leave Vikings-Seahawks unprotected? Will the league decide to flex Sunday or Monday night, if it pulls the flex at all? Will we learn anything about how the existence of multiple flexible windows affects the league’s flex scheduling decision-making process? A lot depends on how the teams in the tentative and potential alternative games do this week; it’d be hard to justify flexing in the Panthers or Vikings if either of them lose this week to stay or slip below .500. Beyond that, there’s a lot I don’t know without inside information, but tune in Monday for the Last-Minute Remarks to see what I think the league might do.

2025 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 10 | morganwick.com
	3-5-1	6-3
	3-6	6-3
	4-5	5-4	6-day flex
	7-2	7-3	“Funday Football”
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/7)
	6-3	5-3-1	TNF-safe (CHI BF, GB TG)
	8-2	5-4	@IND: FOX
	5-4	4-5	@PIT: W18

Week 14: Fox’s triumphant embrace of an all-AFC matchup in their featured window has run headlong into the reality of yet another injury to Joe Burrow. The Bengals’ losses in their last three games have been by a combined eight points, but losses they remain, and the last one particularly hurts because the Bears play in the game most likely to replace Bengals-Bills in the late afternoon window. Burrow returned to practice this week and has started talking about a potential return in the Thanksgiving night game against the Ravens, and while that’s more about when he’d like to come back than when he actually could come back, it does suggest that Bengals-Bills could well stay put if the Bengals can get even one win the next couple weeks and stay relatively close to the playoff picture.

As it happens, the Texans might be able to keep their head just enough above water to avoid Texans-Chiefs being flexed out of Monday night. As it stands Bears-Packers is one of only two games on the Sunday slate pitting two teams above .500, and the only one that can be flexed. That would seem to make the decision of what game to protect and what schedule changes to make an easy one, but what happens if Burrow comes back or is ready to, the Bengals are still on the outskirts of the playoff picture, and the Texans stumble a couple more times? What decision would Fox make regarding what game they want to keep and what game they want to let NBC have? Could we see Bears-Packers replace Bengals-Bills in the late afternoon… as Bengals-Bills moves to Sunday night? With this being the first week where SNF flexes can be made on six days’ notice, this one could come down to the wire and hinge on the results over Thanksgiving weekend.

(The Cowboys have a worse record than the Texans, and the Packers playing on Thanksgiving and the Bears playing on Black Friday could mean their game could move to TNF if needed, but I would expect “Cowboys uber alles” to carry the day there even if Bears-Packers is unprotected, and in any case we might have just passed the deadline for a Thursday night flex.)

2025 Week 15 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 10 | morganwick.com
	3-6	6-3
	6-3	7-2	LAR: W16 TNF
	5-3-1	8-2	GB: W16 Sat
	4-5	3-5-1	6-day flex
	3-7	5-4
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/14)
	8-2	7-2	SEA: W16 TNF
	6-3	8-2	@BUF: SNF
	7-3	5-4	v. LAC: YT

Week 15: Back in May, I mentioned that the Sunday slate this week was so riddled with games that couldn’t be flexed that the only reason it didn’t represent a failure by the league to schedule with flex scheduling in mind was because of the principle of “Cowboys uber alles”. Thankfully for NBC, the Cowboys have been more respectable than a lot of people expected after the Micah Parsons trade, and even if they weren’t and “Cowboys uber alles” wasn’t a thing, the Colts’ surprising season means the league actually would have a viable alternative to flex in. On the other hand, the Dolphins becoming a tire fire has resulted in a game warranting a flex that would be even more difficult to replace.

I was worried about CBS having a number of marquee divisional matchups they wouldn’t need to protect, but when it comes to Monday night CBS doesn’t even need to protect their hottest non-divisional matchups. All told, here is the complete list of all games that can move to this Monday night: Jets-Jaguars, Cardinals-Texans, Titans-Niners, Panthers-Saints. Only one of those four games doesn’t involve a team with a worse record as the Dolphins. ESPN might be hoping the Dolphins’ wins over the Falcons and Bills, only briefly interrupted by hosting Lamar Jackson’s return, is the start of them making a late-season run, because as it stands they’re probably stuck with them.

2025 Week 16 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 10 | morganwick.com
	7-2	7-2
	5-4	6-3	DET: Xmas
	3-6	3-7	6-day flex
	6-4	8-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/21)
	5-4	8-2	DEN: W17 TNF
	6-3	5-5	@TB: W18
	8-2	4-5
	7-3	3-5-1	DAL: 6 PT DAL: Xmas

Week 16: Bengals-Dolphins, on the other hand, remains the likeliest flex on the slate; if Burrow has already returned to practice and is talking about a Thanksgiving return, the one scenario where I imagined the Dolphins game possibly keeping its spot, Burrow returning there, is probably out of the question. (Now if the Dolphins go on that late-season run I was talking about, that’s another matter.)

Fox has no fewer than three games involving only teams with better records than the Bengals, let alone the Dolphins (although one of them probably can’t move because the two teams have a rematch Week 18), and I’d still expect them to protect the weakest of the three because Cowboys – and that’s not even getting into Patriots-Ravens. The Jaguars’ collapse since their big win over the Chiefs and Travis Hunter’s season-ending injury might have doomed Jags-Broncos’ chances of being flexed in, so Patriots-Ravens might now be the primary if not only available alternative, assuming the Ravens continue to win, and with the caveat that the league might be more inclined to throw a bone to the early doubleheader window.

2025 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 10 | morganwick.com
	7-2	6-3
	6-3	6-4	6-day flex
	7-2	3-6
2 of These Games to Saturday 12/27
	7-2	5-5
	4-5	7-3
	4-5	5-3-1
	3-6	3-6
	2-8	2-7
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/28)
	5-4	8-2

Week 17: On the league’s Flexible Scheduling Procedures page, Thursday night flexing is only mentioned to be applying to Weeks 14-16, implying that this year’s Christmas night game is not subject to flex scheduling. That should probably have been expected; Thursday night flexing is bad enough without also potentially ruining two teams’ Christmases on short notice.

In May I noted that the league seemed to be swinging for the fences when it came to the Saturday slate, just in time for Peacock to take over one of the Saturday flex windows that have heretofore been NFL Network’s turf, with no fewer than three potentially marquee (or at least, potential lead singleheader or early doubleheader) games slated for potential Saturday moves when there are only two Saturday windows. Early on it looked like that had backfired so badly that the league was looking at a matchup of two potentially fraudulent teams in the Seahawks and Panthers as the only one with two teams so much as on the outskirts of playoff contention, but now Lamar Jackson is back, Burrow is likely to be back, the Texans (and Ravens) are only a game out of the playoffs, the Seahawks look great, the Panthers still have a recent win over the Packers on their resume, and right now a game involving a 4-5 team would be left out of the Saturday doubleheader. Just in time, too: with the Falcons going on a four-game losing streak after getting as high as 3-2 with a Monday night win over the Bills, the prospect of a Monday night flex is very much in play. Jaguars-Colts is still a better game than any of the potential Saturday games, but it could lose that status at any moment. 

Week 18: If Week 18 were this week Chargers-Broncos and Lions-Bears would be division title games, and Ravens-Steelers arguably qualifies for that as well; there’s a very real possibility the Ravens catch the Steelers before their first matchup Week 14. Panthers-Bucs could also become a division title game if that race tightens, while Packers-Vikings could well end up deciding the order of finish between them. Trumps-Eagles could be a long-shot contender for a Saturday spot if it has seeding implications for the Eagles compared to the other division winners, while Chiefs-Raiders could determine the viability of the Chiefs’ division title or even playoff hopes, and the NFC West games should at least be contenders for Saturday, especially if Seahawks-Niners would decide the order of finish between them, unless the Niners fall too far out of the playoffs and the division winner’s seed is more or less locked in. The AFC East and South are likely to have their games scheduled simultaneously to decide their respective division titles, though seeding implications could scramble that; if the Broncos, Chargers, and Colts all enter Week 18 with identical records and in their respective division leads, Colts-Texans could be an enticing Saturday candidate, and it might even have an outside shot at becoming a division title game. (When it comes to Saturday, I don’t think the league would worry about whether the Jaguars have anything to play for as long as they aren’t playing another playoff contender.)