This could be said about just about any season under the current contract, but this might go down as the season where CBS and Fox’s additional protections against flexing, and the league’s refusal to schedule with flex scheduling in mind, officially bite the league in the ass – with an assist from its own hubris.
Let’s start with the Philadelphia Eagles, who officially shut down Jalen Hurts for the season last week after the blood clot found in his calf turned into more blood clots in his lungs. The NFC East is shaping up to be the league’s top candidate for tire-fire status, but the Eagles could still end up essentially out of it by the end of the season, and the league clearly felt that that, coupled with Washington’s 1-4-1 start, made the game between those teams this coming week enough of a potential drag on Sunday Night Football that they attempted to have CBS waive its right to air one half of Browns-Steelers. But now that Hurts is done for the year, the league is stuck with two Eagles games in standalone windows that can’t be flexed at all: at the Cowboys on Thanksgiving, and at home to the Seahawks on Saturday, December 19.
Their games in featured windows that can be changed aren’t much better. Steelers-Eagles is CBS’ lead late doubleheader game Week 11, but I don’t know how much CBS is willing to pivot to Raiders-Broncos as their new lead game (especially with the Raiders now on a four-game losing streak), and I know they don’t want to put on Jaguars-Giants and showcase the Anti-Cowboys, even as a matchup between two 4-2(-1) teams. Texans-Eagles is the Week 16 Thursday night game, and the Texans may well contribute as much to that game being questionable as the Eagles do, but the only games that can be flexed into TNF that week involve teams that are 2-5 at best, no better than the Eagles at the moment – and perhaps more importantly, while that game is technically flexible, that night is Christmas Eve, so the league would be highly reticent to ruin two teams’ Christmases on relatively short notice. The following week’s Sunday night game is a potentially nastily lopsided Eagles-Niners contest, but again, the only available options aren’t likely to be any better.
But at least the Eagles are a big-market NFC East team with a big fanbase. Then there’s the league’s last winless team, the 0-6 Los Angeles Chargers, technically a big market team but without much of a fanbase to speak of there. Because the Chargers have been perennial playoff contenders in recent years, they’ve been identified for a number of featured windows, though only three official primetime appearances, one of which is on Monday night just outside of the main flex window. That’s followed by a Sunday night date with the Patriots that is in the flex window, but it falls on a Thanksgiving weekend where the Sunday slate has been further diluted by a fifth game in the days surrounding Thanksgiving. That Fox can’t rely on the division rivalry rule to keep Seahawks-Niners helps, but it still only leaves games involving teams that are 3-4 at best as options, one of which would put a team on SNF in consecutive weeks.
Yet the Chargers are so dire that, depending on how the Texans do, that might end up being the window most likely to see a flex this year. The Chargers have one more flexible window, but it’s on Thursday night, the window most difficult to flex out of, against the Niners in a potentially even more lopsided contest than the Eagles game. There are multiple potentially strong candidates out of the TNF-eligible games, though both of the other two flexible primetime games are likely not to have flexes considered, so there’s nothing stopping CBS and Fox from protecting them. But it probably doesn’t matter either way, because CBS’ lead late doubleheader game that week is Cowboys-Rams, and both that game and Niners-Chargers are being held at SoFi Stadium, making a flex out of the latter literally impossible. (Did I mention that this is the week directly before Texans-Eagles?)
I get that you can’t always arrange things so that you avoid weeks where both teams in the same city are at home, forcing one of them into a non-Sunday game, and I get that when you’re putting together the schedule you don’t anticipate the need for a flex, but this still feels like an unforced error on the league’s schedule-makers – made all the worse by the fact that CBS has a Saturday night game that week that could have easily been made Cowboys-Rams, putting Bears-Bills into the Sunday afternoon window. (Admittedly, I don’t know if CBS has ever had an all-NFC game in a standalone window outside Thanksgiving and the playoffs since the advent of crossflexing.) But a lot of other problems the league is running into this season feel like they’re of their own making. Eagles-Quinns falls into the week where the league put Ravens-Bills into CBS’ early doubleheader window, and may have tried to arrange things so it would be as insulated from a potential flex as possible, but gave NBC a game that, while an NFC East matchup between big markets and large fanbases, involves a Washington team that was expected to be mediocre, not a great consolation prize for missing out on CBS’ blockbuster doubleheader. Before this past week’s games, Bucs-Bears the following week was subject to considerable speculation over being the subject of a flex of its own, but back in May that was just one piece of what was seen as a shockingly weak first-half slate for NBC, to the point some wondered if the league was belatedly punishing them for overpaying for the NBA and putting that league’s national media revenues uncomfortably close to those of the NFL. Then there’s the decision to create a bunch of new standalone windows in the first place, stretching the schedule so thin that the league almost has no choice but to put mediocre games in some of them.
Part of the problem here may be a matter of mismatched expectations – I wondered last year what flexible scheduling really means for Monday and Thursday Night Football, given the difficulty of flexing games into those windows – but the NFL is in large part responsible for setting those expectations by trumpeting how great flex scheduling is while not publicizing the ways CBS and Fox can protect games from being flexed, to the point of still using “play your way into primetime” when history has shown just how difficult it is to actually do that, especially if you’re not the biggest name team. The Browns are leading the AFC North at 3-2 after getting a single TNF appearance as their sole primetime game, but were at the mercy of CBS to be flexed in for Eagles-Quinns because their opponent in that game was the same one as in their TNF game, and even though both weeks I’ve identified as seeing potential flexes have Browns games that are likely to be unprotected, I’m skeptical that either of them would actually be flexed in (and the one I would be more optimistic about may effectively fall under the division rivalry rule).
But the way the Week 8 schedule played out perhaps most illustrates how people’s expectations don’t align not only with the reality of the flex schedule rules, but of how the league schedules to begin with. If the league really acted like having a good record was enough to “play your way into primetime” and wanted to maximize the quality of the games in all these standalone windows they’ve created, they’d never have a Tier 1 game outside a featured window at all, let alone one that actually does involve star players and teams that would only be scheduled for the early doubleheader on purpose. The league presents flex scheduling as though CBS and Fox are just a stopgap, a dumping ground for games deemed not ready for primetime, even though they wouldn’t be paying nearly as much to the league as they are if that was the case. But when they give CBS and Fox games that are too good that can’t be shown to as wide an audience as possible, they end up paying for it when there happens to be a bad primetime game in that week and they can’t flex out of it. Mike North is the league’s point man for both the schedule release and for in-season flex scheduling, so you’d think he’d recognize that this demonstrates why you don’t put too many CBS/Fox halves of divisional rivalries on other networks in the same flexible week, yet color me skeptical that the league will change its scheduling philosophy going forward.
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.
| 2026 Week 12 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 4-3 |
6-1 |
SEA: 6 PT SEA: W13 MNF |
 |
 4-3 |
0-6 |
|
 |
 3-3 |
2-5 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/29) | |||
 |
 3-4 |
5-2 |
|
|
 3-4 |
6-0 |
|
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. Right now the league doesn’t have any games involving two teams above .500 on the Sunday afternoon slate other than Fox’s lead late doubleheader game, and of its two games involving only 3-4 teams, one of them is a fairly low-wattage contest between the Raiders and Browns. If the Raiders and Falcons both manage to climb above .500, Falcons-Vikings would be my favorite to be flexed in even if the Raiders have a nominally better record (especially if the Vikings are still unbeaten), but recall that the reason I’m starting the Flex Schedule Watch with the Week 12 slate instead of Week 11 is because the Sunday night game in the latter week is between the Vikings and 49ers in Mexico City. The league has used flexes to put a team in Sunday night in consecutive weeks in the past, and obviously they might not have a choice if one of the weeks is Week 18, but it’s not clear how willing they still are to do so. (Maybe giving the Vikings a little extra recovery time from an international game would mitigate in favor of doing so here.)
By the way, here’s a good example of the point I made in the opening section. Last year I suggested that the league needed to take better care in avoiding giving CBS and Fox too many divisional rematches of games in other networks in the same week – a point I’ve made before, but here I noted that the only rule I had governing such games when making my mock schedules went the other way, that games that were scheduled for lead late doubleheaders on CBS or Fox needed to have their rematch on another network. Seahawks-Niners did not follow that rule this year, and the first game between the teams was originally going to be an undercard to Bears-Packers before that game was flexed to the early window after the Packers’ weak start. So now two of Fox’s lead late doubleheader games are going to be matchups of the same two teams, instead of offering a little more variety. This actually works out to the league’s favor in terms of flex scheduling, because Fox has to protect that game instead of relying on the divisional rivalry rule, and the league effectively gets its choice of Fox’s other games, but then you realize that in terms of setting the schedule to begin with, that’s a Tier 2 game that’s not propping up one of the league’s other packages and is instead giving Fox a bonus that they don’t need and that’s not going towards featuring other teams and matchups. If Seahawks-Niners is good enough to be Fox’s lead late game for one matchup – and that’s a higher bar than for any primetime game, since the 4:25 window tends to place more emphasis on big brands – why would the other be initially relegated to an undercard?
| 2026 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 5-1 |
3-4 |
|
 |
 5-1 |
4-3 |
BUF: 6 PT BUF: W12 TNF NE: W14 TNF |
|
 2-5 |
5-2 |
|
|
 3-4 |
4-3 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/6) | |||
|
 4-2 |
5-2 |
CHI: W12 Thu JAX: W14 MNF |
 |
 4-2 |
5-2 |
TNF-safe @CIN: W18 |
|
6-1 |
4-2-1 |
|
|
3-3 |
6-0 |
CAR: W12 MNF MIN: W14 TNF |
|
 4-2 |
3-4 |
DET: W12 Thu |
Week 13: In something of a rarity, this week has a bona fide surfeit of good games, and while the Cowboys aren’t budging, the Rams aren’t likely to remain below .500 for too long, the league is unlikely to flex out of the Thursday-after-Thanksgiving game in any case, and a lot of the good games aren’t in any position to change dates anyway, Texans-Steelers is very much hinging on whether the Texans will play more like the team that extinguished the Jaguars’ fire in London, or fell at home to a Giants team that people have so little faith in that a Cowboys team that struggled to put away Tanner McKee and a one-legged Saquon Barkley, and that the Giants already beat to start the season, is somehow favored to win the division over them. If Texans-Steelers does warrant a flex, the league’s options are likely to be Jaguars-Bears, Bengals-Browns (with the caveat of the rematch between them falling in Week 18), and Panthers-Vikings, with Lions-Falcons likely to join them if the Falcons keep winning. Those aren’t terribly exciting games from a name value perspective, and Lions-Falcons might actually be the best of the bunch when viewed from that lens, so the Texans might not need to win too many more games to keep its spot, but if the league is serious about showcasing potential playoff teams, as Mike North has suggested in the past, they might feel obligated to flex in something. One other thing of note: Panthers-Vikings is currently a 4:25 undercard to Bills-Patriots. Would CBS and the league still be comfortable with that if it ends up being one of the better games of the week?
| 2026 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
6-0 |
4-3 |
|
|
5-1 |
4-2 |
KC: 6 PT KC: 13T/15M |
|
5-1 |
4-3 |
6-day flex |
|
5-2 |
4-2 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/13) | |||
|
4-2-1 |
4-3 |
TNF-safe? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W15 Sat |
|
3-4 |
6-1 |
v. LAR: N’flix |
|
3-4 |
5-2 |
|
Week 14: Right now four of the five 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 Falcons-Browns). 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 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
6-1 |
0-6 |
|
|
3-4 |
3-4 |
LAR: 7 PT |
|
4-2 |
6-0 |
6-day flex |
|
4-3 |
5-1 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/20) | |||
|
5-2 |
4-2-1 |
NYG: W16 MNF |
|
 4-3 |
5-2 |
@BAL: W18 |
|
4-2 |
3-3 |
TNF-safe Both: W16 Sat? |
|
 5-2 |
3-4 |
TNF-safe DEN: W16 Fri |
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, although the Rams have so many primetime appearances as it is that that would likely have required moving one of their other games out of primetime. (At any rate, only two games involving only teams at 3-4 or better are TNF-safe, one each for CBS and Fox, unless the league was comfortable with giving the Giants a Thursday game followed by a Monday game, so the league might still have ended up stuck with this game in any case.)
| 2026 Week 16 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
2-5 |
2-5 |
|
|
6-1 |
5-1 |
KC: 6 PT SF: W15 TNF KC: W15 MNF |
|
4-2 |
3-4 |
6-day flex |
|
4-2-1 |
4-2 |
|
| 2 of These Games to Saturday 12/26 | |||
| 3-3 |
5-2 |
||
| 4-2 |
2-5 |
TNF-safe | |
| 2-5 |
3-4 |
||
 1-4-1 |
6-0 |
||
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/27) | |||
|
5-2 |
4-3 |
@CLE: FOX |
Week 16: The Texans may have to fight like hell to keep their game against the Steelers, a team in the thick of a red-hot AFC North race, from losing its spot, yet their game against the Eagles, a team whose season might well already be over despite the potential for the NFC East to flirt with having a below-.500 champion, may well be completely safe. The only games that can be flexed into Thursday night involve teams with the same 2-5 record as the Texans and Eagles – including a Cardinals-Saints contest that somehow might not only be Fox’s best choice to protect, but could well end up the best game on Fox’s slate overall even after it picks up one of the rejects from the Saturday pool – but it may not matter anyway, as this particular Thursday is Christmas Eve, which the league might be particularly reticent to flex out of and ruin two teams’ Christmases, even if the game technically is flexible.
Meanwhile, both Saturday pools have one game that’s good or at least okay, and another game that could have the league offices tearing their hair out trying to identify something worth showcasing. Bucs-Falcons might well be the leader in the clubhouse for the early game this week simply because even if both teams enter the decision point a game or two below .500, the rest of the division might be weak enough that they’d still be in the thick of the playoff race.
| 2026 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 7 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
4-3 |
4-2 |
|
|
4-2 |
5-2 |
@DET: CBS |
|
2-5 |
6-1 |
6-day flex |
|
2-5 |
4-3 |
|
| 2 of These Games to Saturday 1/2 | |||
| 5-2 |
4-3 |
||
| 3-4 |
2-5 |
TNF-safe | |
| 1-4-1 |
4-2 |
||
| 5-1 |
0-6 |
||
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (1/3) | |||
|
4-3 |
3-3 |
SEA: W16 Fri |
|
4-2-1 |
3-4 |
@NYG: SNF |
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 also involve teams no better than the Eagles. 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. That’s before even getting to the Texans potentially making the Monday night game flex-worthy as well, yet that would be even more difficult to fix; at least it seems unlikely that the league would want to put Lions-Packers on Saturday the following week the way I was worried about in May.
Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.