Starting this year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is naming at least 50 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the nominees named in September, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as candidates for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so at least 90% of the players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most might not be inducted at all, and this list was determined by a “screening committee” separate from the main group of Hall of Fame voters so there isn’t necessarily any correlation with what Hall voters are thinking. Still, it’s useful to see what players the screening committee members see as potentially induction-worthy, and we can look at their relevant honors and argue over which players are worthy of induction.
Morgan Wick
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7
I talked about this last week, but the Cleveland Browns may well have given up on their season – and put the NFL in a very difficult spot in the process, one that could make a mockery of the goals driving flex scheduling.
Last season the Browns went 11-6 and made the playoffs, but did so largely on the back of Joe Flacco, now with the Colts, not their $230 million starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, who played respectably enough (getting the Browns out to a 6-3 start) but was injured in Week 10 against the Ravens and never returned. Despite the sexual assault allegations against Watson and the quarterback that actually led the Browns to the playoffs leaving town, the NFL saw fit to give the Browns four primetime appearances, though they at least put three of them during the flex period.
Well, this year, Watson has looked like a shadow of what he looked like in Houston, making his massive contract look like one of the biggest lemons in NFL history and spawning calls among fans to start backup Jameis Winston, and the Browns have only been able to muster one win all year. Last week they traded Amari Cooper, Watson’s best weapon, to the Bills, seemingly content to tank the season and figure out how to go forward next season – and that was before Watson tore his Achilles this past Sunday, ending his season (and it says a lot that both Browns fans and football fans more generally actually cheered his injury). You wouldn’t think the league would want to feature a team like that in marquee primetime windows if they could help it – yet they may be stuck with all three of the Browns’ games in flexible windows.
Start with Browns-Broncos on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a game I wasn’t sure was a good choice to schedule for Monday night in the main flex period but more because the Broncos weren’t expected to be good than the Browns. Thanksgiving weekend typically means a paucity of good games as the Sunday slate loses two more games than normal, including the high-value Cowboys, to the holiday, and now loses a third to Black Friday. Still, the Sunday slate does have multiple games that can be flexed in, with two CBS games involving teams with non-losing records: Eagles-Ravens as their lead doubleheader game, plus Chargers-Falcons. But the Chargers and Ravens are slated to play on Monday night the previous week in the “Harbowl”. The NFL never schedules teams to play in the same primetime window in consecutive weeks (the Thursday after Thanksgiving aside) and even when flex scheduling was limited to SNF only flexed teams into that situation very rarely and in exceptional circumstances; I certainly don’t think they’d be willing to do that for Monday night where there’s already a rest mismatch. Yet if the league doesn’t want to flex in either the Chargers or Ravens, Cardinals-Vikings might be their only option to so much as involve two teams at 3-4 or better.
What may be harder to replace is Browns-Bengals on Thursday night Week 16. The NFL has tried to prop up Thursday night as much as they can, allowing teams to play two short-week games and introducing Thursday night flex scheduling, but the rules surrounding the latter preclude most games from being moved to Thursday night, and Amazon may be stuck with the sort of underwhelming game that typified TNF in the pre-Amazon era.
The real problem, though, is Dolphins-Browns the following week on SNF. This is the week where five games get set aside for a possible move to NFL Network’s Saturday tripleheader, leaving relatively few games to be pre-scheduled for CBS and Fox’s Sunday slate, and enough of those games are divisional matchups where the first half of the rivalry isn’t being played on their respective conference’s regular network, inoculating them from needing to be protected, that there are a grand total of three games on the CBS and Fox slates that are eligible for a flex, meaning only one of them actually can be flexed in – and all three have been singularly disappointing. Any of the NFL Network games can be flexed in, as was the case with Trumps-Giants a few years ago, and the starts of Washington and Denver have been surprisingly strong enough to justify featuring them, but putting an NFL Network game on NBC means NFLN itself has to dig deeper into the Saturday-eligible pool to fill out the tripleheader, potentially putting a truly dire team on their air.
Last year we saw how the new guarantees CBS and Fox get could have such an effect as to overwhelm the expansion of flexing to Monday and Thursday nights and make any flex incredibly difficult. Now we’re seeing the consequences of it: games and teams that would seem to be shoo-ins for flexes, truly dire situations involving relatively low-wattage teams the league and networks wouldn’t want to feature, and they may be stuck with them.
(Note: If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, do not attempt to rephrase the comment and re-submit it. I’m still using an antispam plugin that’s supposed to require me to approve each commenter once before their comments will go up automatically, but in practice has required me to approve every single comment. I’ve made some changes to the active plugins in hopes that it’ll clear up any plugin conflict preventing it from working properly, but I may end up just ditching this plugin for another one.)
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 I only cover early flexes 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 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, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were 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, that is, 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 either. 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.
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6
All right, let’s start the Flex Schedule Watch for real this time! I wrote most of this post this morning but held off on posting it to see if there would be a change in the Week 8 schedule, and sure enough Bears-Windbags will switch places with Eagles-Bengals and the showdown of big-market star rookie quarterbacks will now be the main late doubleheader game. As I explain below, I may have screwed up a little last week in a way that underestimated the chances for certain games being flexed out, but I still don’t think they’re particularly likely – and our best chance for a flex may well come from Thursday night. This despite the fact that the Browns may well almost be trying to get flexed out of their primetime games.
I’m hoping I’ve gotten things arranged such that your comments should only need to be approved once, but if not I’m going to have to try another anti-spam plugin. I’m also finding the post is getting smushed on mobile as text is no longer automatically clearing the images; if I can’t find a solution for that I may have to adopt another format next year.
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 I only cover early flexes 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 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, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were 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, that is, 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 either. 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.
NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 5
Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.
I’ve got a brand new computer that’s barely two days old and I’m ready and raring to go for another year of the Flex Schedule Watch! Aaaaaaand I forgot that I was only going to start it in Week 6 going forward. Whoops. Well, consider this a test (or at least a way for my work on the graphics not to go to waste) as I’m still finding myself needing to approve comments more often than I’d like despite updating WordPress, so I might have to go hunting for an anti-spam solution that actually means I don’t have to approve each person’s comments more than once, because I generally don’t look at people’s comments or even see that there are any needing approval until I sit down to work on a new post, and I wouldn’t want to drive people away by having the rate of commenting accidentally die down (even if the level of sanity presented by the comments… tends to vary).
(Also, part of the original assumption behind starting in Week 6 was that protections would come in five weeks in advance based on how Thursday night flexing works, but then we got evidence last season that they could come in later, although with some caveats. At one point I suggested not even starting the Watch until Week 8, which I’m not sure I could have actually followed through on. I think next year I’m going to go ahead and start Week 6 if I remember to, partly because that marks the exact one-third mark of the season, partly because there’s still a lot of uncertainty even from week to week this early on, as seen by a number of the write-ups below being very brief.)
I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about Jaguars-Eagles Week 9 being flexed out because the Jags are just so terrible that obviously they should be flexed out – never mind that we thought the same about the Bears last year and it didn’t happen. After that, I became convinced the early flex would only ever be used if a star player is injured, not because a team is simply bad on their own. As Mike North said in the aftermath, “it’s hard to say anybody’s season is over in Week 8, 9, 10”, so the league will give teams, even those as bad as the Jaguars, every opportunity to show they aren’t as bad as they might look through five or six games. I’m not sure if this scuttlebutt has died down since the Jags won a couple weeks ago and removed the possibility of them entering the game at 0-8, but put me down as being skeptical of a flex happening, certainly not if the Jags win one of their two London games. (The fact that Trumps-Giants seemed to have the most support as a flex option, but the Giants are now below .500 and seem decidedly mediocre, doesn’t help.)
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 I only cover early flexes 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 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, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were 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.
Cantonmetrics: 2025 Preliminary Nominees
Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction.
Assessing the Impact of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s New Selection Process
On Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the biggest change to its selection process since the introduction of the semifinalist stage in 2004 – if not longer.
Last year’s selection process saw some head-scratching moves at each stage of the process. The list of preliminary nominees, once numbering fewer than 100, ballooned to 173, yet still saw some head-scratching omissions, with Eric Berry, a member of the All-Decade Team of the 2010s, probably being the most glaring. The list of semifinalists wasn’t too bad, but then the finalists saw the inclusion of the highly marginal resumes of Fred Taylor and Rodney Harrison, seemingly putting them in line for almost certain induction. What attracted the most attention, though, wasn’t anything to do with the modern-era selections, but the selection committee rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell – the first time a senior candidate had been rejected in 12 years – as well as coach/contributor finalist Buddy Parker. Some of the changes the Hall made should address the odd list of nominees we saw last year, but the changes later in the process aren’t necessarily related – and might make the actual issues the Hall faces worse.
Diagnosing Democracy, Part II: How the Democrats’ Crisis Explains Democracy’s Crisis
Note: Despite the title of this post, I’m probably not going to continue with this series; I originally intended for Part II to involve the ongoing back-and-forth over the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when I sat down to prepare to write it I realized I was too far removed from some of the minutia of the debate from October and November. I now intend to rework some of what I originally intended to say into a larger project that might not see the light of day until closer to when it’s completed. This post will partly cover some of the same ground as Part I, but not so much so as to keep from justifying making it part of the series. Also note that this post was mostly written by Saturday morning/afternoon, before the shooting at the Trump rally.
Since Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at last month’s debate, the Democrats have been in a state of simultaneous panic and paralysis. Initially, what few Democrats were willing to go on the record stood by Biden as the party’s candidate, but a steady drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories casting doubt on Biden’s ability to serve as President now, let alone the next four years, culminated last week in actor George Clooney writing an op-ed explaining his experience with Biden at a fundraiser and making the case to replace him. Despite Biden proclaiming that he’s not going anywhere, elected Democrats up to and including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have intimated that he still has a decision to make. More and more Democrats are convinced that Biden cannot possibly defeat Donald Trump in November if he’s the nominee, and are becoming desperate to nudge him out of the race.
But it’s not clear that they have any better alternatives. Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be both the most natural, straightforward choice to replace Biden and the one least likely to alienate the party’s key constituencies of Blacks, women, and Black women, is deeply unpopular in her own right, tremendously disappointed in her attempt at a presidential run in 2020 to the point of dropping out before any contests were held, and before the debate, was one of the loudest defenders of Biden’s mental acuity, raising concerns that nominating her would simply shift the nexus of controversy from “Biden isn’t mentally fit for the job” to “Harris tried to sell the American public on someone not mentally fit for the job”. (Indeed, if it weren’t for Harris’ baggage renominating Biden might not be so fraught – though by the same token, neither would replacing him with her.) Most other candidates that have been floated – Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer – are fairly milquetoast white-bread Democrats whose national appeal is relatively untested and that might not be able to overcome the extent to which their selection would alienate Blacks, and might still have to answer for the Democrats’ initially sticking with Biden. Any of them would have to overcome the fact that they weren’t selected in a traditional open primary process, regardless of what schemes the Democrats come up with to simulate one.
An attitude I’ve seen on Twitter is that Democratic politicians and celebrities like Clooney and Jon Stewart, and donors like Abigail Disney, are privileged enough to be relatively fine in a second Trump reign, so can afford to take the risk of replacing Biden, but ordinary people can’t. But there is no risk-free option here. Replacing Biden would expose the Democratic Party as weak and present a nominee that doesn’t necessarily have the confidence of the base, but not replacing Biden would not only mean sticking with a candidate that was already an underdog before the debate in large part because of people’s concerns about his age and mental acuity (concerns that now might not be completely surmountable no matter how well Biden does the rest of the way given what’s been reported and where he might be in four years), and hoping against hope that he doesn’t have any more “senior moments” between now and the election that would underscore those concerns (or even devolve to the point that they’d have to invoke the 25th Amendment and effectively run Harris anyway), but send the message that the Democratic Party doesn’t care what the people whose votes they need think about their nominee, that they will take what the party gives them and like it. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest path of all.
No matter what the Democrats do, they are staring at the prospect of, more likely than not, losing the election to Donald Trump, possibly even in the popular vote, allowing him to entrench his imperial, fascistic vision of the presidency and the GOP to enact their Project 2025 and Agenda 47 plans, potentially resulting in the last competitive presidential election for the United States as we know it. No matter where you are within the Democratic coalition, so long as you’re in it this is an unfathomable outcome. Democrats have loudly complained that the media is spending too much time on Biden’s age and not enough on Trump’s own mental deficiencies and destructive agenda. The idea that the American people would seemingly vote for fascism over democracy because democracy’s defender is too old seems outrageous.
But if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be because of Biden’s age and mental acuity alone. Rather, those things, and the way the Democrats have handled them, have ultimately underscored what it is that has made Trump so consistently popular in the first place.
Diagnosing Democracy, Part I: The (Real) Problem with Jon Stewart
Note: This post was almost entirely written by March 6 and only touched up today, so parts of it may be out of date.
In February, Jon Stewart made his triumphant return to The Daily Show after nine years away, effectively skipping the bulk of the Trump era and leaving most of that time to his successor Trevor Noah while working on other projects, to host Mondays through the election. What transpired reminded many fans of Stewart’s Daily Show of, perhaps, why his original departure may have been well-timed.
For his first show back, Stewart discussed the report from special counsel Robert Hur that cleared Joe Biden of mishandling classified documents upon leaving the vice presidency but characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who struggled to remember facts under questioning, re-igniting concerns over whether Biden is too old to serve four more years as president. Stewart played clips of Donald Trump and his associates claiming not to remember things at their own depositions over the years, but spent the bulk of the segment seemingly reinforcing the concerns over Biden’s age, picking apart a press conference Biden gave where he forcefully responded to the special counsel’s assertions but seemed to struggle afterwards, and responding to Democratic surrogates playing up his “sharpness” and “engagement” in official meetings on talk shows over the weekend by suggesting that, if he’s so sharp in those settings, perhaps they should be captured on camera. By contrast, Trump only received one or two shots on relatively trivial matters over the course of the segment, with no mention of the most concerning development to come from his side over the weekend, his seemingly blackmailing NATO allies with a Russian invasion. Stewart was excoriated by various figures on the left, including Keith Olbermann and even Trump’s estranged niece Mary, for focusing on concerns over Biden’s age instead of the far more existential threat posed by Trump’s return to the White House. Responding to those concerns on his second show back, Stewart twisted the Washington Post‘s Trump-era slogan into “democracy dies in discussion” and spent the rest of the segment facetiously studying Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Vladimir Putin to learn how to speak “of course” to power.
Assessing the 2024 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective
At first glance, you might think the NFL deserves credit for scheduling more games between good teams for featured windows. Only one game I identified as a Tier 1 game isn’t scheduled for a featured window – though it feels like an insult to the drawing power of Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow that the two games between them are slated for the early doubleheader (with a Tier 2 game in the same window) and Thursday Night Football, the least of the league’s three primetime packages. This success, though, is tempered by the fact that the Jaguars had a high enough win total to qualify for Tier 1 status last year, and of the three Tier 1 games on last year’s Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t, two were Jags games and the third was Ravens-Bengals again. So the league scheduled its best games in virtually the same way, they just had one fewer ratings poison team expected to be among the top handful in the league. And when you take a closer look at how they scheduled games in the flex scheduling period, you can tell they learned nothing from last year’s flexing paralysis.
In the past I’ve rolled my eyes at people attempting to assess flex scheduling prospects before the season even begins. After all, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But I was stunned to see last year that one of the Games That Should Be Nationally Televised had a very real chance to be in line for a flex even if the teams involved in both that game and the Sunday night game played exactly as expected – and then when the time came, and Dolphins-Ravens was set to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, it couldn’t be flexed because CBS didn’t have to protect its late doubleheader game of Chiefs-Bengals. It was surprising to see the league create this sort of situation to begin with, where teams performing exactly as expected would create a situation where the league would want to pull a flex, but to set things up so you’d want to pull the flex but can’t should have been completely unacceptable. My takeaway from last season was that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.
With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Saturday and again on Christmas Wednesday, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.
What the 2024 NFL Schedule Should Look Like
The 2024 NFL schedule is slated to be released tonight at 8 PM ET – not ideal as it falls in the middle of network upfront week, as opposed to past years when it was released before upfronts so networks could promote the games on their schedule, with the most likely culprit for the delay being ongoing negotiations with Netflix and Amazon for the slate of Christmas Day games that were unexpectedly added.
Last year, I published a list of the games that should have been given featured windows on the 2023 schedule but weren’t. As the year went along, however, I became increasingly convinced that the protections given to CBS and Fox in the new TV contracts had the effect of severely constricting the league’s schedule flexibility. If CBS and Fox no longer needed to protect divisional matchups if the other half had already been scheduled for another network, or if they no longer needed to protect games involving the biggest brands – the Cowboys and Chiefs – at all if they had the minimum eight games involving them, it suddenly became a lot more difficult to flex any games at all. The idea of “playing your way into primetime” had long been a joke, but now it had been rendered an outright lie. To the extent they ever wanted to, the league can no longer rely on flexible scheduling to deliver the best matchups to the biggest audiences. This became most apparent in Week 17, when a Dolphins-Ravens game to determine the #1 seed in the AFC was stuck in the early doubleheader window while CBS’ late window remained focused on a game between the Bengals, whose playoff chances without Joe Burrow were hanging by a thread, and the Chiefs, virtually locked into the 3 seed at that point, and while the Sunday night game involved two teams in the Packers and Vikings that, at the time, were on the outside looking in on the playoff picture. As it happened, I’d identified Dolphins-Ravens as one of the games that should have been given a featured window but wasn’t, and even suggested that if things played out exactly as expected, it would be a potential candidate to be flexed in for Packers-Vikings.
In short, the increased difficulty of flex scheduling means that the schedule that’s announced in May should set the league up for success as much as possible. At least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.
Given these constraints, it’s not enough for me to point to certain games and say they should have been given more prominent spots; I should be able to put together a schedule that maximizes distribution of the best games and teams and minimizes the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible, while still allowing for some diversity of teams featured, giving networks shots at the most desirable teams, and generally putting something together that looks like what the league might actually put together. That’s what I intend to do in this post: put together the sort of schedule that the league should be constructing. Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.