NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

Apologies for this coming out so late, but I wanted to make sure I got the rules spiel below right and was satisfied with it because I’m probably going to be copy-and-pasting it for years to come. Here’s hoping this is the last time this year I have the dreaded “does not incorporate Thursday night” warning, at least until the last few weeks when I drive myself crazy trying to figure out the Week 18 situations only for the league to blithely steamroll past them!

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.
• 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 28 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. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• 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.
• 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. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday 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): Okay, new rule: I’m not covering early flexes unless a star player on one of the teams is injured, not because one of the teams is sucking on their own, because the NFL just made clear that that’s the only situation where they’ll use it (aside from a potentially game-postponing COVID situation). Justin Fields actually is injured, but the Bears were sucking enough with him that that’s not all that relevant. I may change those plans if reporting comes out with an alternative explanation that makes sense to me; it is, of course, possible that the logistics of moving games around scared off the league, or even that, with new contracts going into effect, the same-network flex-swap rule, introduced some time into the previous contract, is actually a hard-and-fast rule to an extent not the case in the past (which would have made Rams-Cowboys the only Fox game Bears-Chargers could have been flexed out for, unless Fox was somehow willing to give Rams-Cowboys up to CBS), though the league should be a lot more careful with its scheduling in that case, and in any event, I’d think in the latter case you could, internally, pull the flex and then carry out any crossflexes in two separate steps to get the game on the other network anyway (and it shouldn’t have been an obstacle to flexing in Jags-Steelers). But if this had come in the main flex period, it would probably be the single worst non-flex of all time.

What saves it from that status is how I’ve always suspected the league looks at the early flex and which this seems to solidify: that the first ten weeks of NBC games really aren’t supposed to be looked at as flexible in the same sense as the main flex period, and the early flex is a true break-glass-in-case-of-emergency valve where the circumstances of the game are different from expected. The Bears weren’t really expected to do all that great to begin with (though both they and the Chargers are significantly underperforming expectations), so this game was scheduled with the full expectation that it might not be very good and with an eye towards the size of the markets and fanbase (obviously not fanbases – #LARaidersVegasChargers) as much as anything else. (And fine, I guess I’ll also mention the theory one of my commenters has that networks prefer to have LA games whenever possible so the stars of their shows can have a “meet-and-greet”, though the SAG-AFTRA strike would make that difficult in this case. I can say that because said commenter has an even crazier theory about what happened here, which you can see in the comments of the Last-Minute Remarks post if you want your brain to melt.) Games in the main flex period can be scheduled as placeholders that could pay off handsomely or be flexed out if need be, but that’s not how the early flex works.

Week 10 (SNF early flex): Between that and Joe Burrow looking like Joe Burrow again, this is probably the last chance for an early flex this year, and the Jets have shown enough flashes of excellence against good teams even with Josh Allen under center that the chances of a flex-out here seem remote. If it were to happen, it might be as much because of the Raiders as the Jets, and we’ve already seen how the league treats teams that are just plain bad in the early flex period (and even before this week’s non-flex, I figured that if there’s even a slight chance Aaron Rodgers comes back this week there’s no way it’s moving). The Jets are on bye this week so have only one more chance to lose against the 1-5 Giants before the decision has to be made; that certainly wouldn’t look good on their resume, but I don’t know that a 3-4 team is really demanding to be flexed out, certainly with an early flex. Bit of a shame with a pair of decent games in Fox’s early window.

Week 11: I’m calling an audible with the protections compared to what I listed on last week’s introductory post. You may have noticed that for games between divisional opponents on their respective conference’s network, I’m now using the space on the bottom right to list what network aired or is scheduled to air the other half of the matchup, if different. If it’s true that Fox and CBS are now explicitly guaranteed to air at least one half of each division rivalry, and that has an impact on where games can be flexed, that’s important with regards to protections. Jets-Bills was never going to be flexed into Sunday night, but it’s significant whether the reason is because CBS protected it or because the game at MetLife Stadium aired on ESPN earlier in the year, and that makes it so that CBS doesn’t need to protect it. So I have CBS taking a flyer on Seahawks-Rams, on the assumption that if the Jets truly go into the tank and the Rams are doing well enough, CBS can promote it to its lead game with minimal moving of games around and featuring a team with a good-sized fanbase against the #2 market in the country. I’m not ruling out them protecting Raiders-Dolphins, but that’s what I’m thinking. (If CBS does still need to protect divisional matchups where the other half is on another network, of course they’ll protect Jets-Bills.)

That sort of thing is going to pose a problem for the league and may actually make flexes rarer despite their expansion to Monday and Thursday nights. The Broncos are bad – it’s pretty clear Sean Payton hasn’t been able to fix Russell Wilson – and the Vikings aren’t really that much better, but these are the only games involving teams at 3-3 or better at the moment. The prospect of the league flexing in Raiders-Dolphins for Vikings-Broncos isn’t exactly appetizing, even with Tua Tagovailoa and the Raiders’ sizable fanbase. Fortunately, I think this would be a “just-in-case” protection, and as long as Jets-Bills isn’t a complete disaster in the making, CBS will be willing to release their protection to put Seahawks-Rams on Sunday night.

Week 12: The first Monday Night Football game ever to be eligible to be flexed out may well be flexed out, but this is the week where in years past I’d be saying “Thanksgiving week, paucity of good games”, and sure enough the options don’t exactly look encouraging. The good news is there isn’t a single Fox logo on the list (Saints-Falcons pits two 3-3 teams but the return match is Week 18 and with the tire fire the NFC South is shaping up to be that may well be a game the league wants to put in a standalone window), so there’s only one protection to worry about; the bad news is that outside Bills-Eagles, all the games involve teams at 3-3 or worse, and the game involving a 3-3 team that’s most likely to improve on that mark, Steelers-Bengals, is a division game where the other half is already a primetime game. The prospect of flexing in Chiefs-Raiders or Bucs-Colts is not exactly appetizing. If the Raiders can maintain even a respectable pace, they might just be flexed in to feature Patrick Mahomes (and Travis Kelce’s probably-girlfriend) and improve the distribution of Bills-Eagles. (Meanwhile, unless the Bears beat the Chargers in that Week 8 game as part of going completely into the tank, NBC is probably stuck with the Chargers no matter how bad they get, as long as they’re better than the Bears.)

Week 13: While this is the mirror image of Week 12 above with no CBS eyes, there’s not really a pressing need to flex out any of these games, especially given the lackluster alternatives once you get past the potential NFC Championship preview. Now, if Green Bay goes into the tank and one or two of these 3-3 teams goes on a tear, that could be another matter, but Chiefs-Packers should draw even if the Packers are bad and there are no viable flex-out alternatives.

Week 14: When Awful Announcing broke down the flex-eligible Thursday night football games, next to Week 13 they said “lol the Cowboys aren’t getting flexed out” and next to Week 14 they added “ditto the Steelers”. I didn’t think that snark was warranted – only the Cowboys inspired the creation of an almost explicit rule never to predict them to be flexed out – but it’s still shocking to see just how dire the Patriots have become and how far the mighty have fallen. And yet, it’s hard to see what’s there in terms of viable replacements, with Bills-Chiefs and Rams-Ravens probably being protected (if they were due today) even if their respective networks weren’t concerned specifically about TNF flexes. That would leave Texans-Jets as the only game that’s both TNF-eligible and involves two teams at or above .500, and it’s both a) unimpressive in terms of name value (unless Aaron Rodgers is back) and b) no sure thing that either of them won’t slip to the down side of that mark.

I should mention that to my knowledge, the only reporting on the existence of a rule prohibiting teams from playing more than one TNF road game is a single sentence in a larger tweet from Adam Schefter when TNF flexing was passed. This despite the fact that the league’s head of PR posted the actual, full text of the TNF flex rule that was passed with no mention of a one-road-game rule, meaning it was either part of the rule expanding TNF to two games per team per season (which would, admittedly, be a more natural place for it) or part of the CBA. I don’t want to cast aspersions on one of the more well-connected reporters out there, but this seems like the sort of circumstance where there’s a good chance of him being wrong or using poor phrasing; it’s entirely possible that the rule is that teams can’t be scheduled for more than one TNF road game, since that actually did hold up in the announced schedule. (Which is also something I’m hedging on with the guaranteed-half-rivalry rule.) That would open the door for any of Jaguars-Browns, Bucs-Falcons, or Colts-Bengals to enter the running; only the Steelers, Bears, Saints, Commies (to steal an epithet from the 506sports Discord), Niners, Lions, and Packers started the season scheduled for two TNF games – seven teams, three of them in the same division, and only one AFC team.

If there is a one-road-TNF-game rule, that opens up the games that would violate that rule to instead move to Monday. But besides the low wattage of the teams in those games, I actually kinda think the Titans might be at least marginally better than their record, having played only two true home games and winning them both against Justin Herbert and the last game of not-Joe Burrow. The teams they’ve lost to mostly being around .500 doesn’t help, and neither does Ryan Tannehill’s injury, but they might have an acceptable enough record to justify the game keeping its spot by the time Week 12 rolls around.

Week 15: Joe Burrow looking like Joe Burrow again doesn’t help Vikings-Bengals as much as the league would like, as there’s still the matter of the Vikings having a not-particularly-good record. But they aren’t as putrid as the Bears, Broncos, and Panthers, so the third Saturday game may come down to whether the Bears or Broncos can be less putrid and which team has the fanbase outside their home market that can pop a better rating. The Broncos’ one win coming against the Bears may couple with the league’s reticence to feature Deshawn Watson to tip the scale to Broncos-Lions unless the Bears start looking like a completely different team going forward.

Things are looking better for a potential Monday night move to bail out of what could be a laugher of a Chiefs-Patriots game. Fox has two games involving teams at 3-2 or better that aren’t divisional matchups, and one is a West Coast game that’s likely to be buried behind the other. This may be the best bet for a potential flex we’ve seen so far.

Week 16: In the past I’d have skipped this week with NBC abandoning Christmas Eve night to NFL Network and playing non-flexible games on Saturday instead, but by all appearances TNF flexing is in place even if shorter-distance flexes aren’t. Saints-Rams isn’t a great game, but it’s not so bad as to demand a flex without a truly overwhelming alternative, and the best option available to the league right now looks to have the exact same pair of records with less starpower.

Week 17: This could be an interesting situation if the Packers and Vikings continue to underperform. The Lions look to be running away with the division, so this isn’t a tire fire situation where a game between two below-.500 teams somehow has playoff implications, but it also might not be so bad as to absolutely demand a flex-out, especially if its lack of playoff implications works in its favor by allowing the Week 18 slate to be announced before the end of the game, and it is a classic NFC North rivalry between two teams with solid fanbases. Dolphins-Ravens is a good game that’s likely to be unprotected, but the question is whether that would leave CBS with too weak of an early window with Raiders-Colts and Patriots-Bills. You could also see Fox leave Steelers-Seahawks unprotected in favor of Niners-Commies or even Saints-Bucs, since it’ll be pinned to the late singleheader with limited distribution. Speaking of Saints-Bucs, if the NFC South is shaping up to be the tire fire the North isn’t, that game could have significant playoff implications if that outweighs the ease of setting the Week 18 schedule. If the Jets and/or Browns go into the tank, the Thursday and Sunday night deadlines being three weeks apart could leave the league, and Fox, in an odd position, especially since Saints-Bucs might not realistically be movable to Thursday since its eligibility depends on being able to give the Saints a full week off when the Bucs wouldn’t.

Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.