NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

On Monday the NFL announced that Jaguars-Giants would be switching places with Steelers-Eagles and replace it as CBS’ lead doubleheader game Week 11. I didn’t fully cover it here because this feature is primarily about the league’s official flex scheduling windows – Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights, plus the late-season Saturday slates – with 4:25 only covered as a bonus addendum as it can be harder to predict and less likely to change. Part of the reason it’s less likely to change is because the 4:25 window tends to emphasize big brands, markets, and stars more than actually good teams; a team like the Jaguars can be scheduled for games in each of the primetime windows after a divisional-round run last year, but it’d take a lot more than that for them to ever sniff a lead 4:25 game, at least when the schedule’s initially announced.

So while Jaguars-Giants would seem to be the clear choice to flex in on record alone, after what happened (or rather, didn’t happen) last year I wasn’t convinced that the Jaguars would ever be flexed into any flexible window with an established tentative game, and certainly not the 4:25 window where its status as the Anti-Cowboys would hurt them all the more, which is why I thought last week that CBS was more likely to just promote Raiders-Broncos to the lead game. But I might have been more open to the possibility if I’d known this:

This will be the Jaguars’ first time playing in the featured game of a network’s 4:25 window since Week 6 of the 2018 season (at Dallas on CBS). That was the second-longest such drought, only behind the Falcons, who haven’t played in a featured 4:25 game since the 2017 season.

— Sports TV News & Updates (@TVSportsUpdates) November 9, 2026

That’s right: in a window that emphasizes brands and stars above all else, 31 of the 32 NFL teams have been lead games in the last eight and a half years, and the 32nd team represents a big enough market that its failure to appear is more about their lack of success in that span than anything else. Even the Colts, who saw their 2020 game against the Packers get the bulk of distribution and the Buck-Aikman team over Cowboys-Vikings. Even the Cardinals, who had a road game against the Cowboys assigned the lead team in 2021. Even the Titans, perhaps the second-least-valuable team in the league, though that comes with the caveat that Titans-Texans in 2019 fell in Week 17 when it was still the final week of the season and playoff implications actually do trump name value there, which is probably the only way that game gets the lead crew over Steelers-Ravens.

So you could argue that, while the 4:25 window does emphasize brands and stars, it’s not that important as the season goes along and a low-wattage but good team can still find their way there if the circumstances warrant. However, I still could have found reason to be skeptical. The Colts and Cardinals games were against the two most valuable teams in the league, and while the Giants are certainly a valuable, big-market team that can always justify a spot in the late doubleheader window, they aren’t the Cowboys or Packers. Notably, that 2018 Jaguars game was also against the Cowboys, with an additional late doubleheader game earlier in the season against the Tom Brady Patriots, a year after Blake Bortles took the Jaguars to the AFC Championship Game before falling to the Patriots. Would CBS really have been willing to take on a Jaguars game against a team with strong but not top-tier name value? I might have decided it was worth going with over Raiders-Broncos, but frankly I might have thought CBS’ preference would be to stick with Steelers-Eagles even with the Eagles in a tailspin.

So, does this remove the last objection to flexing in Jaguars-Bears Week 13? Maybe not. Last Wednesday Mike Tirico appeared on ESPN Chicago’s Waddle and Silvy show, and starting at 25:20 (or thereabouts), engaged in his own bit of flex scheduling speculation. While no specific games were mentioned (other than Pats-Chargers), his conclusion was that a Bears game being flexed in at any point this season was unlikely because of all the rules restricting flexing and all the other windows taking away games. But the Jaguars game has stood out enough, even by the time the interview was conducted, that I feel like the hosts dropped the ball by not asking a follow-up about it. More on what could be going on there in the appropriate section.

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 9 | morganwick.com
	5-4	7-1	Protected? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W13 MNF
	5-4	0-8
	3-5	3-6
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (11/29)
	4-5	5-4
	4-5	3-5	Protected?
	3-5	6-2
	3-6	6-2
	2-5-1	3-6	WAS: W11 MNF

Week 12: In recent years I’ve seen some discussion of flex decisions that speak of a game needing to be flexed out as though you’re either vulnerable or you’re not, and I’ve lapsed into talking in those terms myself, but it’s never quite fit right with me. Before the expansion of flex scheduling to Monday and Thursday nights, I considered the possibility of a flex more in relative terms: if a game was substantially enough better to overcome the tentative game bias, I’d predict that it was getting flexed in, even if the tentative game was okay in a vacuum. Week 13 may end up being a test of that philosophy, but this week is a test of the opposite. The league won’t have any games eligible to be flexed in where the worse team is better than 4-5, yet one of them may end up being flexed in anyway because the Chargers are such an unmitigated disaster – and the game involving a 4-5 team is a fairly low-wattage contest between the Raiders and Browns, so the league may well end up picking a game worse than that.

The big story of the trade deadline did end up potentially throwing the league a bone by creating additional storylines around two of the candidate games with one trade: the Raiders sending Kirk Cousins to the Vikings. Flex in Raiders-Browns and you’re giving Fernando Mendoza his first primetime game; flex in Falcons-Vikings and you’re showcasing Cousins’ first home game back with the Vikings where he’s also playing one of his former teams. Further helping Falcons-Vikings, in addition to probably being the best of the contending games from a name value perspective, is the fact that with the NFC South potentially becoming one of the biggest tire fires in the history of the league, the Falcons, despite their .333 record, are only half a game out of the playoffs.

With so much in its favor, the flex would seem to be Falcons-Vikings’ to lose, so what might cause it to lose it? In past weeks I’ve wondered if the league might be more reticent to put teams on Sunday night in back-to-back weeks, but that may be little more than idle speculation on my part, and even if there is something to it that might be outweighed by the prospect of giving the Vikings a little extra time to recover from an international game. But from a pure record perspective, besides Raiders-Bengals, Falcons-Vikings now trails whichever game involving a 3-5 team CBS doesn’t protect. I have them leaving Saints-Bengals unprotected but I don’t feel great about it, especially since it’ll be Jacoby Brissett at quarterback for the Ravens against the Texans.

I still think Falcons-Vikings has enough attractiveness that I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a flex announcement as early as Thursday afternoon (even though we already saw the Week 11 flex announcement this week), but the Falcons are playing the Chiefs, and with the two NFC South leaders playing each other, the Falcons are guaranteed to lose ground in the division with a loss. Moreover, even if the Falcons win, if Mendoza looks good enough against the Seahawks to get the Raiders back to .500 the league may decide Raiders-Browns has suddenly become too hot to ignore; if that happens I’m going to punt my prediction to a Last-Minute Remarks post. As for the CBS games, it’s hard for me to get a read on them; I don’t know how attractive the Ravens are without Lamar Jackson, and I don’t know how much value the league puts on the Saints if they’re leading the division but at 4-5. I don’t think either game is beating Falcons-Vikings if the gap is only half a game, but check back with me on Monday.

Final prediction:

• Atlanta Falcons @ Minnesota Vikings to SNF (if the Falcons win and Raiders lose);
• Las Vegas Raiders @ Cleveland Browns to SNF (if the Raiders win and Falcons lose);
• No prediction until Monday otherwise.

2026 Week 13 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 9 | morganwick.com
	6-2	5-4
	7-1	5-4	BUF: 6 PT BUF: W12 TNF NE: W14 TNF
	3-5	6-2
	4-5	5-4
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/6)
	6-2	7-2	CHI: W12 Thu JAX: W14 MNF
	7-1	5-2-1
	6-2	5-4	TNF-safe @CIN: W18
	3-5	6-2	CAR: W12 MNF MIN: W14 TNF
	6-3	3-5	GB: 6 PT GB: W12 Wed

Week 13: With the Panthers going on a losing streak since the start of this year’s iteration of this feature this week hasn’t looked like it’s had quite the bounty of good games that it looked like after Week 6, and with Bengals-Browns potentially off-limits and Niners-Giants probably protected, the state of affairs this week really is probably going to come down to Jaguars-Bears. After last Monday night’s 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, 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. All told, 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 any of the games pitting NFC South against NFC North teams (including Lions-Falcons, not listed here, especially if Falcons-Vikings isn’t flexed in the previous week) being ahead of them in the league’s pecking order.

Still, if Jaguars-Bears is in such strong shape and isn’t likely to be protected, why would Tirico be skeptical about the prospect of the Bears being flexed in at any point? Well, the person who pointed me to the Tirico appearance also noted that the Bears have eight appearances on Fox this season. As a refresher, when the current contracts were signed it was reported that CBS and Fox were guaranteed a minimum number of games of certain teams in their respective conferences, and at one point in the first season under the new contracts, it was reported that Fox was guaranteed eight Cowboys games, which greatly complicated a particular flex decision that year and may have contributed to it being announced a week before I would have otherwise thought it needed to, so I figured each network could request eight games of a certain number of teams. Then the following year, CBS was scheduled for only seven Chiefs games and I couldn’t figure out what other team they could possibly have requested, and an early-season flex decision only made sense to me if CBS had to protect Chiefs games, so it’s not like seven was a hard minimum or that CBS was guaranteed an eighth game in Week 18, so I pretty much gave up on factoring that rule into my analysis.

With how big a star Caleb Williams is becoming, it would make some degree of sense for Fox to identify the Bears as a team they wanted eight games of – the Cowboys weren’t expected to be all that good – although I might have expected them to request the Packers who had at least one more win on their win total line. It’s worth noting that this was pure speculation by the person who brought it up; while Tirico mentioned the division-rivalry rule and the ability of Fox and CBS to protect games, he never brought up the minimum-appearances rule at all, let alone suggested the Bears were subject to it. Still, if Jaguars-Bears isn’t flexed in, this may turn out to be the reason why.

And then, of course, all this may be moot if the Texans continue to bounce back. Even going 1-1 against the Browns and Colts the next two weeks may well prove to be enough for their game to keep its spot. But if you leave the name value of the teams out of it, Jaguars-Bears is indexing way above the two-game advantage that was my benchmark for a potential flex in the SNF-only era, and the league just proved that it is willing to flex in a Jaguars game under the right circumstances. This could be a big test case for measuring the league’s thinking going forward.

2026 Week 14 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 9 | morganwick.com
	6-2	5-4
	6-2	6-2	KC: 6 PT KC: 13T/15M
	7-1	6-3	6-day flex
	6-2	6-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/13)
	5-2-1	5-4	TNF-safe? SEA: 6 PT SEA: W15 Sat
	5-4	7-1	v. LAR: N’flix
	3-5	3-5	TNF-safe

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. 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. (And it would be something of a repeat of what happened last year, when Fox initially promoted Bengals-Bills as its lead doubleheader game, what would have been the first time an all-AFC game had that honor for Fox, but with the Bengals’ injury-riddled season it was moved to the early window but remained the lead game there.)

2026 Week 15 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 9 | morganwick.com
	7-1	0-8
	4-5	5-4	LAR: 7 PT
	6-2	6-2	6-day flex
	5-4	6-2
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/20)
	5-4	5-2-1	NYG: W16 MNF
	4-5	6-2	@BAL: W18
	7-2	4-5	TNF-safe DEN: W16 Fri
	6-2	3-5	TNF-safe Both: W16 Sat?
	6-2	3-5	v. JAX: NFLN

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 3-5 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 9 | morganwick.com
	3-5	2-7
	7-1	6-2	KC: 6 PT SF: W15 TNF KC: W15 MNF
	6-2	4-5	6-day flex
	5-2-1	6-2
2 of These Games to Saturday 12/26
	3-5	6-2
	3-6	3-6
	2-5-1	6-2
	6-2	2-7	TNF-safe
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (12/27)
	5-4	4-5	@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, may well be completely safe. The best worst record in any game that can be flexed to Thursday night is Cardinals-Saints with the Cardinals sitting at 3-6, 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 as mentioned earlier the Panthers haven’t won since this year’s iteration of this feature started. The Saturday doubleheader may just default to the two games involving NFC South teams because at least they’ll have clear playoff implications even if all three teams are below .500.

2026 Week 17 Flex Schedule Watch Through Week 9 | morganwick.com
	4-5	6-2
	6-2	7-2	@DET: CBS
	2-7	7-1	6-day flex
	3-5	6-3
2 of These Games to Saturday 1/2
	7-2	5-4
	5-4	3-6	TNF-safe
	2-5-1	6-2
	6-2	0-8
Sunday Afternoon Flex Candidates (1/3)
	5-2-1	4-5	@NYG: SNF
	5-4	3-5	SEA: W16 Fri

Week 17: 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 at 3-6 or worse 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, though with how tight the division is that could easily change.

Week 18: I’m experimenting with bringing back HTML tables for the Playoff Picture charts, though I’m not entirely happy about it. Part of the problem is the aspect ratio for the new images I introduced for team logos last year, as previous logo images were significantly more horizontally-oriented, but part of it is that there’s still too much padding in the the table cells, and while that’s fine for the weekly tables it doesn’t produce the best results here. Anyway, your NFC North games are Bears-Vikings and Lions-Packers, and your NFC South games are Falcons-Panthers and Bucs-Saints. Other games to look out for are Browns-Bengals, Raiders-Chiefs, or Seahawks-Rams, while Cowboys-Talaricos, Dolphins-Patriots, Steelers-Ravens, and Niners-Cardinals could be interesting even if they’re only relevant for one team. But really, any game on the slate could have playoff implications and be a contender for at least a Saturday move, especially with Saturday moving to a tripleheader this year.