Did the NFL Get the Week 18 Schedule Right?

Heading into this past Sunday, there was concern that Week 18 of the NFL season would be a complete dud. The Lions and Colts had already been eliminated by the Lions losing and Texans winning, meaning all the potential wild card teams were already in the playoffs and the only spots remaining to be determined were the winners of the NFC South and AFC North, and if the Steelers, Panthers, and Dolphins all won, all 14 playoff teams would be determined through Week 17 with only seeding left to be settled.

In the end, that did not end up happening. The Browns pulled the upset over the Steelers, the Seahawks had a fairly dominating win over the Panthers, and the NFL had a veritable surfeit of games that it could put in its standalone windows, with the two remaining playoff spots to be decided by division title games in Panthers-Bucs and Ravens-Steelers. I’m not titling this post “Week 18 Schedule Post-Mortem” because when I did that it was in the aftermath of an almost indefensible schedule (and the time before that involved me needing to recalibrate my expectations), and that’s not what happened here. I predicted the schedule more or less completely accurately, with Panthers-Bucs on Saturday and Ravens-Steelers as the Sunday night game. This despite the fact that right up until the Week 18 schedule was actually announced at the end of the Bears-Niners game, there were a number of people on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter absolutely convinced that the Sunday night game would be Seahawks-Niners.

This was absolutely astounding to me. I had been pretty much convinced that as long as the AFC North division title game was an option, it would get the nod for Sunday night – it had all the advantages in terms of stakes, name value, and storylines. Yet as the Sunday night game went on I actually started second-guessing myself and seeing the case for Seahawks-Niners to get the nod. In the end, the original logic I went by won out and I couldn’t help but celebrate a little even as I was no longer sure it was the right move. Certainly many of the people who expected Seahawks-Niners to get the nod, rather than simply admitting they were wrong, moaned that the league had made a mistake. So in this post I’m going to break down exactly why the league set the schedule as they did by looking at every argument made in favor of Seahawks-Niners and why they fell flat.

Seahawks-Niners could determine who goes to the Super Bowl; Ravens-Steelers likely determines who craps out in the first round. You know what game would actually determine who goes to the Super Bowl? An NFC Championship game between the Seahawks and Niners. Sure, Saturday’s game would determine where such a game would be played and what sort of path each team would take to get there, with the winner getting home field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs while the loser gets a wild card, but it’s hard to argue that that’s more important than whether or not they have a chance to get there at all.

Certainly that’s not the way the league is going to think. I don’t think they’re in the business of telling teams that they have so little shot at going anywhere in the playoffs that we’re going to focus on the game with real implications between two teams already there – that home field advantage between these two teams is more important than whether or not these other two teams make it at all. If you’re really the best team in your conference, you’ll find a way to the Super Bowl regardless of what path you end up taking to get there. No regular season game is going to be as important as an actual playoff game unless it determines whether or not you make the playoffs at all. As far as the league is concerned, making the playoffs is what’s important; seeding among the playoff teams is secondary. They’ll feature a win-and-1-seed, lose-and-wild-card game like Vikings-Lions last year, but not over a win-and-in, lose-and-out game, all else being equal.

Let’s not discount the possibility that the Ravens or Steelers don’t have such a quick exit, either. Weak division winners have a surprisingly strong record against 5 seeds that might seem superior on paper; even the NFC South champion might turn out to be feistier than you think. The Ravens, in particular, are probably better than their record since they’ve missed Lamar Jackson for a couple good-sized chunks of the season and could be very dangerous if they make the playoffs. As I write this, during the third quarter of Panthers-Bucs, the Ravens’ odds to win the AFC on DraftKings are higher than that of the Chargers and could climb as high as third if they win Sunday night.

I have to wonder: did the people making this argument see the moaning, just 24 hours earlier, about how Week 18 would be a dud if all 14 playoff teams were determined, even if division titles and home field advantage were still to be settled? And now you tell me that a game to determine division titles and home field advantage between those already-determined playoff teams is more important than a game to actually determine playoff teams?

For that matter, did they not realize how much more compelling Chiefs-Cowboys on Thanksgiving was for both teams being on the outside of the playoff picture? The Chiefs didn’t look like a team that could win another Super Bowl and yet the prospect of them not making the playoffs only heightened the intrigue of their games in the third quarter of their season. For a pair of teams that have always been relevant, even – perhaps especially – if you think they’re terrible on the field, you don’t think there’s interest in what happens to whatever team doesn’t make the playoffs, whether it’s the end of the Mike Tomlin era in Pittsburgh or the John Harbaugh era in Baltimore, or whether the stage is set for Lamar Jackson leaving the Ravens? You don’t get those kinds of stakes with Seahawks-Niners. If this were any other week of the season Seahawks-Niners would absolutely get the nod as the better two teams, but that’s not how the league treats Week 18, which is all about how it sets up the playoffs.

That’s not to say the league would always take a game to determine playoff teams over a game to determine division titles and the 1 seed; in 2014 the league overlooked both types of games in favor of a division title game with a decent chance of determining home field advantage for a rematch the following week, which ranked ninth on my 10 Worst Flex Scheduling Decisions. If Ravens-Steelers wasn’t on the table, even if the weird situation where the NFC South could partly hinge on Saints-Falcons wasn’t a factor, I believe the league absolutely would have taken Seahawks-Niners over Panthers-Bucs. But that wouldn’t be so much because of the perception of Seahawks-Niners being more important as the name value and overall attractiveness of the teams, which leads to the next point.

Seahawks-Niners is a storied rivalry with both teams having a recent history of success. Not as much as Ravens-Steelers. I don’t know how much NFL fans care about the Ravens-Steelers rivalry, but networks sure do, and of the four teams we’re talking about the Steelers are the most storied and have the largest fan base; the Seahawks and Niners have only been in the same conference for the last 23 years, before which point Seahawks fans saw the Raiders as their biggest rival. The Seahawks and Niners have sizable fan bases, but in terms of what appeals to the average NFL fan, the Ravens and Steelers resonate more.

The edge tips all the more to Ravens-Steelers when you consider the personnel and storylines in the game. Jackson (if he plays) and Aaron Rodgers are a much bigger deal than Sam Darnold and Brock Purdy, and at the time the decision was made there was a very real possibility that if the Steelers lost, it would be the last game of Rodgers’ entire career. That’s not even getting into the storylines I mentioned in the previous section regarding the potential end of coaching tenures or of Jackson’s time in Baltimore.

What happened in 2014 and 2022 suggests that name value is more important than stakes, however defined, and I do think there’s an argument to be made that the relative attractiveness of the games is close, but it’s very hard to make an argument that Seahawks-Niners has enough of an edge to overcome the stakes of Steelers-Ravens being superior in the league’s minds.

The league doesn’t want the Ravens to have three straight NBC-produced games. Regardless of what game was picked, you’d have a team in an NBC-produced game in consecutive weeks, and the Niners would be in the actual Sunday night window both weeks. That may not make a difference to the league, but it may make a difference to the fan. One person suggested to me that NBC would like to have Sunday night games in the same venue in consecutive weeks so they could leave all their equipment in the same spot and not have to take it somewhere else, but I could see it feeling repetitive from the fan’s point of view.

It’s unfair for the Seahawks and Niners to play on short rest. Of the four teams under discussion, the Ravens were the first to play in Week 17, the only one to play on Saturday, while the Niners were the last. It would therefore be logical to have Steelers-Ravens be the earlier of the two games and Seahawks-Niners the later one; in this sense, the prospect of the Niners playing on Sunday night in consecutive weeks would actually work in their favor. This is one thing that genuinely gave me pause about my prediction, but I don’t get the sense the league has taken that sort of thing under consideration in the past; they won’t have a team that played on Monday the previous week play on Saturday, but they won’t give deference to teams that played before Sunday when determining the Week 18 Saturday games.

(As for rest from a forward-looking perspective, you might think that a game where the winner gets a bye should be the later of the two games. But the Ravens-Steelers winner is likely to play in the Monday night wild card game, so the order the league actually went with works better in terms of the Ravens-Steelers winner consistently playing later than the Seahawks-Niners loser.)

The Rams shouldn’t know if they can move up to the 5 seed before they play. I don’t think I actually saw this argument, and it’s the sort of excessively nerdy thing that most people wouldn’t know or care about, and as it is it’s only relevant because the Rams lost to the Falcons on Monday night, and I could see the league thinking that was too remote a possibility to prepare for. As it stands a Niners win would lock the Rams into the 6 seed, while a Seahawks win would give them a chance to move up to the 5 and play the weak NFC South champion instead of the Eagles or Bears. This is another compelling argument, though it sounds like the Rams will play their starters regardless (at the least they might want to try and salvage Matthew Stafford’s MVP case after everyone seemingly flocked to Drake Maye following the Monday night game). But I think there was another way to preserve the stakes of the Cardinals-Rams game, and this is where I discuss what happened with the rest of the Week 18 schedule.

Several corners expressed surprise that ESPN would get both of the non-SNF marquee games with guaranteed playoff implications and concern about the league valuing ESPN over CBS and Fox (even on ESPN’s airwaves!), but when the Saturday doubleheader was created I thought providing a national showcase for multiple potential standalone games was, if anything, the whole point, and as such I thought the very existence of the Saturday doubleheader was bad for CBS and Fox precisely because the league would favor ESPN in this situation. But looking at the Sunday slate, I think there was an argument to be made to forego sending ESPN one of those marquee games and instead letting one of the Sunday afternoon networks have it.

On Sunday, there are six games in the early window and seven in the late window. The AFC South games are the only early window games with playoff implications, and the networks think so little of them that Fox is sending most of the country a meaningless Cowboys-Giants game instead of Titans-Jaguars. The AFC East games, as well as the Bears and Eagles games, have all moved to the late window. Personally the games I would have moved to the late window are the Patriots game (only) and the AFC South games; that would ensure that the Broncos couldn’t have clinched the bye before game time and the Chargers couldn’t be locked out of the 5 seed before game time, ensuring maximum implications for Chargers-Broncos. That alone would have resulted in six games in the late window, most of them with iffy attractiveness; Fox would probably be stuck deciding between Dolphins-Patriots and Cardinals-Rams as its late game, rather than the Lions-Bears game they’re actually sending to most of the country, and all that is with the league getting lucky with the Bills loss knocking them out of the division. That’s why I suggested that, even with the Broncos locking up the division, Chargers-Broncos could have moved to Saturday to make setting the Sunday schedule easier – even at the expense of one or more of the potential standalone games (and especially with both teams playing on Thursday and Saturday the previous week).

Consider the scenario where ESPN’s Saturday schedule consists of Panthers-Bucs followed by Chargers-Broncos, and Seahawks-Niners goes to 4:25 on Fox, giving Fox a marquee game the Saturday doubleheader might have otherwise made impossible for them to have. CBS could then showcase Cardinals-Rams, or still move the AFC South games late (perhaps accompanied by Dolphins-Patriots), or even move the Bears and Eagles late so one of them can be CBS’ lead late game. If Seahawks-Niners ends up the Sunday night game, then the question becomes whether CBS gets Ravens-Steelers, or if the league decides people don’t have to be able to see Panthers-Bucs and has it played at 1 PM ET, which I think is a fairly close decision. Any game on Sunday afternoon isn’t going to get a truly national audience, so the league would want Ravens-Steelers and Seahawks-Niners to get the biggest audiences; as such, the idea that Seahawks-Niners remaining on Sunday afternoon is an idea worth considering, more so than Ravens-Steelers, reinforces the attractiveness and fanbases the Ravens and Steelers have all over the country.

Of course, in contrast to the Rams, it sounds like the Chargers were going to rest their starters even if they could have improved (or needed to defend) their seed, which reinforces why the league is prioritizing ESPN so much this week. The last thing you want is to put on a game where one team is resting up for the playoffs, even more so than a game where one team is out of it but can at least play for pride. And it also shows that regardless of what you may think of the Ravens and Steelers’ chances, the Chargers don’t think so poorly of them that they care that much about facing them over the Jaguars or Patriots.