I think going forward I’m going to target Wednesday afternoon-Thursday morning for the Flex Schedule Watch unless there’s a good reason to post it earlier. Last week’s post went up on Wednesday morning, a few hours before 506sports posted its coverage maps for the week, and that produced enough backlash to how little coverage Browns-Steelers was getting compared to Ravens-Bills to spur Grok to produce a trending summary on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, when I hadn’t realized how much anticipation there was for that game. I called out how the league set itself up to be unable to pull the flex even in situations that would normally clearly call for it last week, so this week I’m going to defend the league and why it and its network partners were relatively fine with Browns-Steelers getting little coverage outside the territory of the participating teams and, weirdly, the South.
While Browns-Steelers was for first place in the AFC North, stakes and actual good teams don’t drive ratings nearly as much as brands and stars. Last year’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game was the Super Bowl rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs, way back in Week 2, followed by the modern Brady-Manning rivalry between the Chiefs and Bills; the 6-11 Chiefs played in four of the five most-watched games of the year. The most-watched non-Thanksgiving regular season game not to involve the Chiefs was Eagles-Bills Week 17, pitting a big market against Josh Allen. NBC’s most-watched non-Thanksgiving game by Nielsen standards was the Kickoff Game between the Eagles and the almighty Cowboys, while its most-watched Sunday night game was the Lions and Chiefs in Week 6, two teams that ultimately missed the playoffs; that and Bears-Niners Week 17 were the only Sunday night games to outpace Packers-Cowboys Week 4. As much as I defended the decision to give the Sunday night slot Week 18 to Ravens-Steelers over Seahawks-49ers, the latter game earned more viewers for ESPN and ABC than any Sunday night game last year, and two million more than Ravens-Steelers; the most watched Monday night game was a Week 3 contest between the Ravens and Lions, again, two non-playoff teams. Outside of Christmas, Amazon’s most-watched regular season game of the year was the week-after-Thanksgiving game between the Cowboys and Lions. The same teams crop up again and again at the top of each package’s list of most-watched games, and there isn’t that much of a correlation with the best teams or even teams that made the playoffs.
All of which means that, for all the brouhaha over flexible scheduling, if you simply divvied up the games between the teams with the biggest fanbases across the league’s marquee windows, the TV partners would probably be fine without any flexing. Even with both teams having mediocre-at-best seasons, if you hooked up NBC executives to truth serum, they’d tell you they’d much prefer to have Eagles-Quinns over Browns-Steelers. As for CBS, last year I made the point that every game has value to CBS and Fox even if they’re buried on the depth chart, but you might still think that swapping out Browns-Steelers for Eagles-Quinns would be a net positive… but putting Washington in the 1 PM window wouldn’t add as many viewers as you might think given the considerable crossover of fanbases for each other’s teams in the Baltimore and Washington markets. You’d have to either put it at 4:25 as an undercard to Chiefs-Broncos, or put it on Fox and engage in some crossflexing. That’s not even getting into how having Ravens-Bills and Browns-Steelers on the same network at the same time helps YouTube to sell Sunday Ticket. A less valuable game, or even one not involving Washington, might well have seen CBS be willing to relinquish Browns-Steelers, but the networks are more than fine with the way things played out.
Would the league prefer to showcase potential future playoff teams than continue to shove the NFC East down viewers’ throats even as it looks like it might be the NFC Least? Sure, but even then there might be some within the league that are relieved that they didn’t create a national showcase for DeShaun Watson and all his controversy in the middle of the season where one wasn’t pre-scheduled. Frankly, I still don’t quite believe there was any real clamor for a Week 8 game between the Browns and Steelers, division lead on the line or no, to get a national audience. As I mentioned last week, the real problem is that the hype surrounding flex scheduling creates expectations for which games are given national audiences that doesn’t align with the reality of what the networks value. The league may have had to lay in the bed that it made, but ultimately, this was the schedule it wanted and it’s the schedule it got, with or without the Browns outperforming expectations.
(A brief note before we begin: I’m not covering Week 11 because the Sunday night game that week is from Mexico City and not flexible even if the teams involved didn’t have two losses between them, but there’s a very real possibility that CBS bails out of Steelers-Eagles as its lead late game. At this point, though, if it happens I fully expect them to promote Raiders-Broncos to the lead spot, even if the Raiders lose this week, if only because it wouldn’t require asking the league to move any games around, and it totally doesn’t have anything to do with their best early game, Jaguars-Giants, involving the Anti-Cowboys.)
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 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 4-4 |
6-1 |
SEA: 6 PT SEA: W13 MNF |
 |
 5-3 |
0-7 |
|
 |
 3-4 |
3-5 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/29) | |||
 |
 4-4 |
5-3 |
|
|
 3-5 |
6-1 |
|
|
 2-4-1 |
3-5 |
WAS: W11 MNF |
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 the one game involving a team at .500 is a fairly low-wattage contest between the Raiders and Browns. Given the choice, NBC and the league would probably much prefer to flex in Falcons-Vikings, but the Falcons have been decidedly inconsistent and their one game before the decision point is a trip to Madrid to play a Bengals team that might be the best team in an AFC North that’s strong even with the Ravens losing their top two quarterbacks – and that also means the Falcons can’t get back to .500 before the decision point. Even then, 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.)
The Raiders don’t have a great chance to so much as stay at .500 either; their next two games are against two of the best teams in football in the Niners and Seahawks. Governors-Cardinals could end up emerging as a dark horse, but that would require both teams to win their next two to climb back to .500, and Washington has a visit from the Rams followed by a short-week rematch of Tiegate against the Giants at MetLife, while the Cardinals face their own pair of NFC West opponents in the Seahawks and Rams, and the former is at Lumen Field. (On the plus side, win both of those and they’re no worse than tied for second in the division and within two games of a wild card.) In all likelihood, the league’s only alternatives to Pats-Chargers will involve teams below .500, yet unless the Chargers suddenly find their offense and upset the Texans and admittedly-Lamar-less Ravens – and considering that would only get them to 2-7, maybe even then – the tentative may be dire enough that the league won’t have much of a choice but to flex it out for something. At least Falcons-Vikings and Governors-Cardinals would have the advantage of at least one of the below-.500 teams potentially being closer to the playoffs than their record would suggest due to the weakness of their respective divisions.
| 2026 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 5-2 |
4-4 |
|
 |
 6-1 |
5-3 |
BUF: 6 PT BUF: W12 TNF NE: W14 TNF |
|
 2-5 |
6-2 |
|
|
 3-5 |
4-4 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/6) | |||
|
 5-2 |
6-2 |
CHI: W12 Thu JAX: W14 MNF |
|
6-1 |
4-2-1 |
|
 |
 5-2 |
5-3 |
TNF-safe @CIN: W18 |
|
3-4 |
6-1 |
CAR: W12 MNF MIN: W14 TNF |
|
 5-2 |
3-5 |
DET: W12 Thu |
Week 13: Conversely, the league may feel obligated to pull a flex here because of the quality of the options available to them even if the tentative is passable. In particular, after the Monday night game where the Bears looked like Jeffery Simmons might make them the best team in football, people started circling Jaguars-Bears on this week’s schedule as a game they’d be begging the league to flex in. I’d remind people that there are a lot of similarities between that game and last year’s Jaguars-Broncos game that was the main contributor to my considering the Jaguars to be the Anti-Cowboys, but the Bears do have more name value than the Broncos, Fox is likely to protect Niners-Giants, there isn’t a game with the name value of Pats-Ravens waiting to snipe it, and in fact the name value of the alternatives isn’t great in general and is almost inversely correlated with how good the teams are. In fact, if Bengals-Browns is considered off-limits because of the rematch falling in Week 18 and the NFC South teams continue to struggle to stay at .500, Jaguars-Bears might be too far ahead of the field to ignore, though last year’s Ravens were weak enough that I could see Lions-Falcons being flexed in even if the Falcons are below .500, especially if Falcons-Vikings isn’t flexed in the previous week. And of course, all this depends on the Texans continuing to struggle, and their next three games are fairly easy: at the Chargers, at the Browns, and at home to the Colts; go 2-1 in that stretch and their game might be fairly safe. 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 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
6-1 |
5-3 |
|
|
5-2 |
5-2 |
KC: 6 PT KC: 13T/15M |
|
6-1 |
5-3 |
6-day flex |
|
6-2 |
5-2 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/13) | |||
|
4-2-1 |
4-4 |
TNF-safe? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W15 Sat |
|
4-4 |
6-1 |
v. LAR: N’flix |
|
3-5 |
5-3 |
|
Week 14: But hey, if you want to see the Jaguars take on a 6-2 team in primetime, there’s always this week’s Monday night game! 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. 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 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
6-1 |
0-7 |
|
|
3-5 |
4-4 |
LAR: 7 PT |
|
5-2 |
6-1 |
6-day flex |
|
5-3 |
5-2 |
|
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/20) | |||
|
5-3 |
4-2-1 |
NYG: W16 MNF |
|
 4-4 |
6-2 |
@BAL: W18 |
|
 6-2 |
4-4 |
TNF-safe DEN: W16 Fri |
|
5-2 |
3-4 |
TNF-safe Both: W16 Sat? |
|
3-5 |
2-4-1 |
Both: W16 Sat? |
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 (even if Awful Announcing wasn’t aware of this until I pointed it out to them), 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 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
2-5 |
2-6 |
|
|
6-1 |
5-2 |
KC: 6 PT SF: W15 TNF KC: W15 MNF |
|
5-2 |
3-5 |
6-day flex |
|
4-2-1 |
5-2 |
|
| 2 of These Games to Saturday 12/26 | |||
| 3-4 |
6-2 |
||
| 3-5 |
3-5 |
||
| 2-4-1 |
6-1 |
||
| 5-2 |
2-6 |
TNF-safe | |
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/27) | |||
|
5-3 |
4-4 |
@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 best worst record in any game that can be flexed to Thursday night is Cardinals-Saints with the Saints sitting on the same 2-5 record as the Texans, yet 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, at one point Panthers-Steelers looked like at least an okay game to feature on the Saturday slate, but the Panthers have fallen back below .500, right as some genuine contenders have emerged for the early game. Bucs-Falcons might be hard to beat for that spot 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 8 | morganwick.com | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
4-4 |
5-2 |
|
|
5-2 |
6-2 |
@DET: CBS |
|
2-6 |
6-1 |
6-day flex |
|
2-5 |
5-3 |
|
| 2 of These Games to Saturday 1/2 | |||
| 6-2 |
5-3 |
||
| 4-4 |
3-5 |
TNF-safe | |
| 2-4-1 |
5-2 |
||
| 5-2 |
0-7 |
||
| Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (1/3) | |||
|
4-4 |
3-4 |
SEA: W16 Fri |
|
4-2-1 |
3-5 |
@NYG: SNF |
|
4-4 |
3-5 |
TNF-safe |
Week 17: I alluded to this in the Week 12 section, but as though Amazon’s December wasn’t bad enough, Lamar Jackson lasted all of one play in his triumphant return to the Ravens on Sunday before suffering a thumb injury, completely unrelated to the injury that kept him out much of the season until now, that might end his season entirely. The Ravens have non-flexible primetime games the next two weeks (including what, at least before the Jacoby Brissett trade, looked like a ghastly date with the Chargers where the showdown most worth watching might be in the broadcast booth) and then all their games are already scheduled for the early window until this week, where the only potential alternatives not involving waiving the rules around TNF flexing involve teams at 3-5 or worse, and where it’s difficult enough to bail out of the primetime game involving the previous team to have their season derailed by losing their star quarterback.
The good news (if you can call it that) is that, while this week’s Saturday pool still involves a clear lead game and then three games involving sub-.500 teams, it now looks like the league could cannibalize one of the Saturday games to salvage the Sunday night game, and still give NBC and Peacock a total of three games involving teams at least a game ahead of the Eagles. But there’s probably no salvaging the Thursday or Monday night games, as if Fox doesn’t need to protect its feature game you’re looking at games involving teams with the same 2-6 record as the Eagles (and worse than the Texans) as the only ones you can add to the mix. 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.