NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

The twentieth season (woo!) of the Flex Schedule Watch got off to a slightly early start on Monday with a Last-Minute Remarks post on the prospect of a Week 8 early flex. There, I mentioned that the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe had reported on the possibility that Eagles-Quinns could be flexed out, but I was skeptical about it actually happening given the constraints involved until the news broke about Jalen Hurts’ blood clot. Tucked in his report, though, was an intriguing possible tidbit about the flex schedule process:

Not sure how much stock to put into this tidbit. I’ve basically given up on anything beyond "protections are due basically whenever it’s time for the league to make a decision". Might be able to look back over the current contract and find reason to justify this though. https://t.co/NkcHqgB9ws

— Morgan Wick (@morganwick) October 13, 2026

Now, as I say in the tweet, I’d given up on figuring out any timeframe for protections being due under the current contract other than “at the same time the league has to make a decision”, so this being stated so matter-of-factly made me raise an eyebrow, but Tornoe interviewed the league’s schedule-maker Mike North about Eagles-adjacent flexing situations late in the first two seasons of the new contract, so he’s high on the list of people who would know what they were talking about. That said, this being applicable to the situation Tornoe was writing about would be surprising, as my impression was that regardless of anything else, when it came to early flexes CBS and Fox were able to make protections at decision time even when early flexes were introduced under the previous contract.

Still, is the evidence consistent with a three-week deadline to submit protections? Let’s look back on what clues we’ve gotten over the first three seasons of the current contract and see where things lead:

• 2023 offseason: Mike North implies, and Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill confirms, that the universal Week 5 deadline for protections is no longer in effect under the new contract, with Mulvihill stating “without revealing too much it’s now significantly closer to each game date“. Meanwhile, the league institutes Thursday night flex scheduling; the original proposal would have given teams 28 days’ notice that a game could be flexed to Thursday night, with the actual decision coming with 15 days’ notice. The league ultimately decides to impose a 28-day deadline to make a decision overall. As such, my initial tentative conclusion is that protections need to come down four or five weeks in advance.
• Week 10-11, 2023: On Tuesday, 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco tweets that Fox “plans to protect” Niners-Eagles for Week 13. This makes me conclude that “the deadline for protections is no more than three weeks in advance, and more likely runs right up to the point where the league needs to make a decision”, depending on whether the “plans to protect” phrasing is meant to imply that Fox could be making that protection right after or even before the tweet, or that it merely plans to make the protection after the following week’s games. In any case, at the time I still don’t know how this interacts with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes or the 6-day deadline for late-season SNF flexes.
• Week 13, 2023: On Thursday the league announces Week 15 flexes, which is odd to me because it would otherwise seem to me that if the league wasn’t going to wait for the Week 13 results, they might as well have announced the changes as early as Tuesday. Then on Monday Andrew Marchand, then of the New York Post, reveals the horse-trading that went into those flexes, including that Fox didn’t need to protect Cowboys-Bills because they were guaranteed eight Cowboys games, and the league allowed them to take Bears-Browns from the Saturday pool to convince them to release their protection on (notably, not to refrain from protecting) Eagles-Seahawks. To date, this is the only known time that conference-network appearance minimums have come into play when it comes to flexing, and the Chiefs being scheduled for only seven CBS games the following year, and CBS still needing to protect one of those games, suggests that the way that rule works, or is used by the networks, is difficult to predict. For our purposes, it suggests a fairly short window for when the protection deadline might be: namely, the Wednesday or Thursday heading into the last week before a 14-day decision, basically 17 or 18 days out. (In the above-linked post I also deal with why CBS and Fox submitting protections whenever the league tells them they’re considering a flex, as was suggested to me at the time, both isn’t helpful to me and isn’t completely consistent with the league’s statements.) Two weeks later the league again confirms a schedule, this time without any changes, on the Thursday of the game week two weeks before the one in question, despite the week in question being a six-day flex window for intra-Sunday changes, and it happens again for Week 14 of 2025.
• Week 11, 2024: Broncos beat writer Chris Tomasson says, in a tweet posted right before the start of the Thursday night game, that CBS is “expected to freeze” Eagles-Ravens on the Week 13 slate. That implies that CBS hasn’t yet submitted a protection as the Week 11 slate begins, but said expected protection is prefaced with “as previously noted” so it’s possible Tomasson is repeating something he’d previously reported and not gotten an update on. As far as I’m aware, this is the main piece of evidence against a three-week deadline for protections.
• Week 12, 2024: Our first and so far only Thursday night flex is instituted when Broncos-Chargers replaces Browns-Bengals on the Week 16 slate, which I bring up here because it’s said that the flex was officially made minutes before the deadline, midnight on Thursday night/Friday morning. Under current rules, then, after the Thursday flex deadline was changed to 21 days in advance in the 2025 offseason, the deadline for a Week 16 Thursday flex would be right after the Week 13 Thursday night game, so the Thursday flex deadline is still a week before what the protection deadline would be.

All told, I don’t really see any reason not to take Tornoe’s statement as my assumption going forward, though I do note that the evidence in support of it is all from the first year of the current contract and the one piece of firm evidence since then, while flimsy, works against it. But I’m still going to work under the assumption that the deadline is still “when the decision has to be made” for early flexes, which is going to come into play right away.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

• Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
• Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
• Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
• CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
• On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
• No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Week 8 final schedule commentary (Last-Minute Remarks linked above): I predicted that if Eagles-Quinns was flexed out it would be for Ravens-Bills, but that was based on what was best for the league, just in terms of distribution of the Sunday afternoon games and keeping Baltimore and Washington from having their teams’ games on the same network at the same time depriving them from seeing the other market’s team. Obviously if you asked CBS which game they’d otherwise have the right to keep from the league they’d be more willing to part with, they’d say Browns-Steelers, and Tornoe reported on Tuesday evening that the league did, in fact, consider flexing that game in. I don’t know what sort of negotiations went on involving that and what sort of compensation CBS wanted, but it’s worth noting that, as I observed last year when I saw a similar suggestion made, even games buried on the depth chart have some value to CBS and Fox.

2026 Week 9 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	4-2	4-2	Protected? GB: 6 PT
	1-5	4-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/8)
	4-2	3-2	Protected?
	3-3	6-0
	2-4	5-0	KC: 6 PT
	4-2	2-4
	3-2-1	2-4	@NYG: W18
	2-4	3-3	SEA: 6 PT
	2-4	2-4	DAL: 6 PT

Week 9 (SNF early flex #1): Before Tornoe’s report last week, this seemed to be the week with the most scuttlebutt surrounding the possibility of an early flex. The Bucs have looked less like the team that was actually respectable for much of last season, when Baker Mayfield was actually getting some MVP buzz, and more like the team that collapsed down the stretch and ended up knocked out of the playoffs by a tiebreaker quirk. Mayfield was injured in the Bucs’ loss to the Vikings Week 3 and returned to practice this week, and it looks increasingly likely he’ll suit up this week against the division-leading Panthers, though the Bucs are still preparing for the possibility that undrafted rookie Jalon Daniels starts again.

I’ve had some people suggest that NBC wouldn’t want to lose their only Bears game, and that could help mitigate in favor of this game keeping its spot regardless of what the Bucs do, though if Mayfield plays and the Bucs lose I don’t think there’s any saving it. In any case, I haven’t seen any evidence in the past that the prospect of losing a name team is enough to save a game involving a team with a sufficiently dire record (unless said name team is the Cowboys of course). That this would be an early flex might be a significant caveat, and this could end up being a test case for just how quickly the league would be willing to pull the early flex lever where injuries aren’t a factor.

The biggest problem facing the game is that CBS has two games between teams at or above .500, and neither has any meaningful restrictions to being flexed in to my knowledge, so whatever game they don’t protect might be a sitting duck. (You’ll notice that despite what I say in the opening section, I’ve still marked the games I think the networks would protect if they were due now, but they won’t affect my analysis.) I could see them protecting either one; Raiders-Niners has more name value, but it’s also trapped in the late singleheader so its value and potential distribution is limited. But the league has proven reticent to deprive a network of a window’s lead game even if it’s not protected, so CBS could still protect Raiders-Niners and gamble that the league won’t leave it with only games involving teams at 2-4 or worse at 1 PM ET. But a game involving the Chiefs, especially if they’re undefeated, could be a suitable consolation prize, so the league might just call their bluff (frankly CBS might well send their lead team to Jets-Chiefs no matter what other games they have).

In any case, the Raiders are in a bit of a precarious position, following their 3-0 start with a 3-game losing streak and raising the question of whether their hot start was a mirage, so their game might not be able to afford a loss to the Rams even if the Bucs also lose to keep the gap between them at two games. The good news is that the Raiders were competitive in their losses to the Chiefs and Bills, so maybe they are a decent team that hit a stretch of good teams, but with the Rams losing to the Cardinals at home, the Raiders might need to beat them in Vegas to remain a team anyone would want to pay attention to. Meanwhile the Panthers are both the Bucs’ next opponent and the worse team in their game against the Broncos, and a loss would result in a gap of just a game and a half between them, which probably isn’t overcoming the tentative game bias.

The prediction below comes with the caveat that if Daniels plays and the Bucs lose, the league may decide to roll the dice on Mayfield returning in time for the game, and even if Mayfield plays and loses there’s always a chance that NBC still doesn’t want to lose their one Bears game and isn’t impressed by the alternatives.

Final prediction:

• No changes (if the Bucs beat the Panthers).
• If the Panthers beat the Bucs:
  • Denver Broncos @ Carolina Panthers to SNF (if CBS protects Raiders-Niners);
  • Las Vegas Raiders @ San Francisco 49ers to SNF (if CBS protects Broncos-Panthers and the Raiders win);
  • No changes (if CBS protects Broncos-Panthers and the Raiders lose).

2026 Week 12 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	3-3	6-0	SEA: 6 PT SEA: W13 MNF
	4-2	0-6
	3-2	1-5
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/29)
	3-3	4-2
	2-4	5-0
	4-2	2-4
	2-4	3-2
	3-2-1	2-4

Week 12: My biggest concern about this week’s schedule in May was Panthers-Bucs getting a featured window over a Tier 2/3 game in Ravens-Texans given that the expectation seemed to be that the Panthers would regress. Instead, the Texans got off to a slow start, the Panthers have at least looked decent, and it’s the Bucs that are holding the Monday night game down. But even in May I could understand either decision in a vacuum, especially considering that the NFC South was expected to be weak again, so it was broadly acceptable to have what would be a middling game on its own featured in a week where the creation of a fifth standalone game in the days surrounding Thanksgiving stood to thin out the selection of good games even further. By contrast, the Chargers’ collapse is creating the possibility of an unmitigated disaster in the Sunday night window. The league is looking at only one unprotected game between two teams at .500 or better, and it’s between two fairly low-wattage teams in the Raiders and Browns, yet would they really have any other choice but to flex it in considering how abjectly terrible the Chargers are? And the Texans continuing to improve won’t help matters, because the problem I observed in May is that CBS has no reason not to protect the game.

2026 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	5-0	2-4
	5-1	4-2	BUF: 6 PT BUF: W12 TNF NE: W14 TNF
	2-4	4-2
	2-4	3-3
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/6)
	4-2	4-2	CHI: W12 Thu JAX: W14 MNF
	3-2	5-0	CAR: W12 MNF MIN: W14 TNF
	3-2	4-2	TNF-safe @CIN: W18
	6-0	3-2-1
	4-2	2-4	GB: 6 PT GB: W12 Wed
	3-2	2-4	DET: W12 Thu
	2-4	2-4	PHI: W12 Thu

Week 13: By contrast, this week has a bona fide surfeit of good games and no windows to flex them into. All three of the primetime games have 2-4 teams, but the Texans are expected to continue to improve, the Rams might do the same and I imagine the league is reticent to flex out of the Thursday-after-Thanksgiving game in any case, and the Monday night game involves the Cowboys so it’s probably not moving. There’s also the fact that only two of the good non-featured games don’t involve teams playing on days other than Sunday in the previous and following weeks, meaning they’d probably only be options to flex into SNF at best, and one of them, Bengals-Browns, has a rematch Week 18 that could make the league reticent to flex it in in any case. Texans-Steelers would be very vulnerable if the Texans go back to struggling, but the process of picking a replacement could be thorny. One other thing of note: Panthers-Vikings is currently a 4:25 undercard to Bills-Patriots. Is CBS and the league still comfortable with that, or would they want to swap it out for something else?

2026 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	5-0	4-2
	5-0	3-2	KC: 6 PT KC: 13T/15M
	5-1	4-2	6-day flex
	4-2	4-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/13)
	3-2-1	3-3	TNF-safe? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W15 Sat
	2-4	6-0	v. LAR: N’flix
	4-2	2-4	TNF-safe
	2-4	4-2
	2-4	3-2	TNF-safe
	2-4	2-4	PHI: W15 Sat

Week 14: Right now the four best games of the week are all the ones in featured windows, mitigating the concern I had back in May about a high-tier NFC West matchup Fox doesn’t need to protect being relegated to an undercard, but that could easily change. The biggest potential source of concern is that the two best games that aren’t slated for featured windows are on the West Coast and can’t be lead singleheader or early doubleheader games (and yes, I do consider Niners-Rams to be better than the other games involving 2-4 teams). If the NFL really wants to prop up the early doubleheader window with marquee games, this is the sort of situation that might actually warrant it. To be clear, I don’t think they’d move Chiefs-Bengals to 1 PM if it’s still the best of the Sunday afternoon games, or even if it’s just still respectable; I just think that if they did, it’d be more understandable than what they did with Week 8.

2026 Week 15 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	6-0	0-6
	2-4	2-4	LAR: 7 PT
	3-2	5-0	6-day flex
	4-2	5-0
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/20)
	4-2	4-2	@BAL: W18
	3-2	3-2	TNF-safe Both: W16 Sat?
	4-2	3-2-1	NYG: W16 MNF
	4-2	3-3	TNF-safe DEN: W16 Sat?
	4-2	2-4	v. JAX: NFLN
	2-4	2-4	TNF-safe

Week 15: The alternatives to Pats-Chargers may be uninspiring, but at least they exist. While I’ve still marked the TNF-safe games, Niners-Chargers, a game about as lopsided as you’ll see all year, categorically cannot be flexed out because SoFi Stadium is already booked for Cowboys-Rams on Sunday, and even if CBS would ever in a million years be willing to part with it, the Cowboys have already played a Thursday night game on top of their traditional Thanksgiving game. I know that it’s not always possible to completely avoid weeks where both LA teams are at home so one of them has to play on Thursday or Monday, and CBS and Fox tend to be more concerned with name value than how good the teams are so are more reticent to feature the Chargers at 4:25, but this is still shaping up to be a potential nightmare scenario for the league that I’m hard-pressed to say was completely unforeseeable given the Chargers’ playoff underperformances and Justin Herbert’s polarizing game. Hindsight is 20/20, but it may have been better if Cowboys-Rams had been the Saturday night standalone game, and Bears-Bills the Sunday 4:25 game, rather than the other way around.

2026 Week 16 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	2-4	2-4
	6-0	5-0	KC: 6 PT SF: W15 TNF KC: W15 MNF
	4-2	2-4	6-day flex
	3-2-1	3-2
2 of These Games to Saturday 12/26
	3-2	4-2
	3-2	2-4	TNF-safe
	1-4-1	5-0
	1-5	2-4
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/27)
	4-2	4-2	@CLE: FOX
	4-2	2-4	NE: W15 MNF NE: W17 Sat?
	2-4	2-4	TNF-safe

Week 16: Within hours of my posting the Last-Minute Remarks, word came down that doctors had found more blood clots in Jalen Hurts’ lungs and that his season was over, and with it the Eagles’ season (and Nick Sirianni’s tenure as head coach) might be over as well. A part of me wonders if part of the reason the league was willing to stick with Eagles-Quinns was because they’re going to be stuck with more Eagles games in featured windows as well. There are three more Eagles games in featured windows between Weeks 8 and 16, but two of them are the Thanksgiving game against the Cowboys and a Saturday night game the week before this game, which are completely non-flexible. Steelers-Eagles is the 4:25 feature game Week 11, but I’m not sure how enthusiastic CBS is about making Raiders-Broncos the new lead game, especially if the Raiders’ 3-0 start looks too much like a mirage. And here, the first time we hit an Eagles game in an officially flexible window in the main flex period, the only viable alternatives given the constraints on TNF flexing involve teams with the same 2-4 record, including a game between two 2-4 teams that Fox is nonetheless likely to protect given what is shaping up to be a singularly uninspiring singleheader slate, including a matchup of the league’s two remaining winless teams, the Bizarro version of the battle of unbeaten teams in CBS’ featured window.

Bengals-Colts could be a potentially viable alternative, but the Colts just fired their general manager and aren’t showing even the flashes of viability that carried them to a hot start last year. Yet, on top of that, it’s still the most viable game to fill the first half of the Saturday doubleheader, as the only alternatives involve teams with only one win. Both the Panthers and Steelers are holding up much better than most expected, but the game between them could end up having a singularly uninspiring appetizer – potentially one that only has playoff implications for both teams, if it does, because of the weakness of the divisions involved.

2026 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 6 | morganwick.com
	4-2	3-2
	3-2	4-2	@DET: CBS
	2-4	6-0	6-day flex
	2-4	4-2
2 of These Games to Saturday 1/2
	4-2	4-2
	1-4-1	4-2
	2-4	1-5	TNF-safe
	5-0	0-6
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (1/3)
	3-3	3-2	SEA: W16 Fri
	5-0	2-4	MIN: W16 Sat?
	2-4	4-2	IND: W16 Sat?
	3-2-1	2-4	@NYG: SNF
	3-3	2-4	TNF-safe
	2-4	2-4	@NO: MNF

Week 17: You might think SNF would be an easier place to bail out of an Eagles game, but if Fox doesn’t have to protect its feature game you’re once again stuck with games involving teams with the same record as the Eagles at the moment as your only options, and that’s on top of another slate of Saturday pool games where there’s a clear lead game but the other games involve teams with no more than one win at the moment. For that matter, only three of the games involving 2-4 teams are actually options, and that probably shrinks to two once CBS files its own protection. I think there’s a better than even chance the league and NBC decide to hope the name value and market sizes of the teams outweighs a potentially ugly blowout, especially if the Eagles somehow manage to stay in the NFC Least race, and maybe if the Eagles are out of the playoff race it makes it easier to finalize the Week 18 schedule. (Also helping: I don’t think it looks like Lions-Packers is the potential Saturday game the May win totals had me worried about, so having the Packers play on Monday might not end up completely screwing up the Week 18 schedule.)

Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.