NFL

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

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The twentieth season (woo!) of the Flex Schedule Watch got off to a slightly early start on Monday with a Last-Minute Remarks post on the prospect of a Week 8 early flex. There, I mentioned that the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe had reported on the possibility that Eagles-Quinns could be flexed out, but I was skeptical about it actually happening given the constraints involved until the news broke about Jalen Hurts’ blood clot. Tucked in his report, though, was an intriguing possible tidbit about the flex schedule process:

Now, as I say in the tweet, I’d given up on figuring out any timeframe for protections being due under the current contract other than “at the same time the league has to make a decision”, so this being stated so matter-of-factly made me raise an eyebrow, but Tornoe interviewed the league’s schedule-maker Mike North about Eagles-adjacent flexing situations late in the first two seasons of the new contract, so he’s high on the list of people who would know what they were talking about. That said, this being applicable to the situation Tornoe was writing about would be surprising, as my impression was that regardless of anything else, when it came to early flexes CBS and Fox were able to make protections at decision time even when early flexes were introduced under the previous contract.

Still, is the evidence consistent with a three-week deadline to submit protections? Let’s look back on what clues we’ve gotten over the first three seasons of the current contract and see where things lead:

  • 2023 offseason: Mike North implies, and Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill confirms, that the universal Week 5 deadline for protections is no longer in effect under the new contract, with Mulvihill stating “without revealing too much it’s now significantly closer to each game date“. Meanwhile, the league institutes Thursday night flex scheduling; the original proposal would have given teams 28 days’ notice that a game could be flexed to Thursday night, with the actual decision coming with 15 days’ notice. The league ultimately decides to impose a 28-day deadline to make a decision overall. As such, my initial tentative conclusion is that protections need to come down four or five weeks in advance.
  • Week 10-11, 2023: On Tuesday, 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco tweets that Fox “plans to protect” Niners-Eagles for Week 13. This makes me conclude that “the deadline for protections is no more than three weeks in advance, and more likely runs right up to the point where the league needs to make a decision”, depending on whether the “plans to protect” phrasing is meant to imply that Fox could be making that protection right after or even before the tweet, or that it merely plans to make the protection after the following week’s games. In any case, at the time I still don’t know how this interacts with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes or the 6-day deadline for late-season SNF flexes.
  • Week 13, 2023: On Thursday the league announces Week 15 flexes, which is odd to me because it would otherwise seem to me that if the league wasn’t going to wait for the Week 13 results, they might as well have announced the changes as early as Tuesday. Then on Monday Andrew Marchand, then of the New York Post, reveals the horse-trading that went into those flexes, including that Fox didn’t need to protect Cowboys-Bills because they were guaranteed eight Cowboys games, and the league allowed them to take Bears-Browns from the Saturday pool to convince them to release their protection on (notably, not to refrain from protecting) Eagles-Seahawks. To date, this is the only known time that conference-network appearance minimums have come into play when it comes to flexing, and the Chiefs being scheduled for only seven CBS games the following year, and CBS still needing to protect one of those games, suggests that the way that rule works, or is used by the networks, is difficult to predict. For our purposes, it suggests a fairly short window for when the protection deadline might be: namely, the Wednesday or Thursday heading into the last week before a 14-day decision, basically 17 or 18 days out. (In the above-linked post I also deal with why CBS and Fox submitting protections whenever the league tells them they’re considering a flex, as was suggested to me at the time, both isn’t helpful to me and isn’t completely consistent with the league’s statements.) Two weeks later the league again confirms a schedule, this time without any changes, on the Thursday of the game week two weeks before the one in question, despite the week in question being a six-day flex window for intra-Sunday changes, and it happens again for Week 14 of 2025.
  • Week 11, 2024: Broncos beat writer Chris Tomasson says, in a tweet posted right before the start of the Thursday night game, that CBS is “expected to freeze” Eagles-Ravens on the Week 13 slate. That implies that CBS hasn’t yet submitted a protection as the Week 11 slate begins, but said expected protection is prefaced with “as previously noted” so it’s possible Tomasson is repeating something he’d previously reported and not gotten an update on. As far as I’m aware, this is the main piece of evidence against a three-week deadline for protections.
  • Week 12, 2024: Our first and so far only Thursday night flex is instituted when Broncos-Chargers replaces Browns-Bengals on the Week 16 slate, which I bring up here because it’s said that the flex was officially made minutes before the deadline, midnight on Thursday night/Friday morning. Under current rules, then, after the Thursday flex deadline was changed to 21 days in advance in the 2025 offseason, the deadline for a Week 16 Thursday flex would be right after the Week 13 Thursday night game, so the Thursday flex deadline is still a week before what the protection deadline would be.

All told, I don’t really see any reason not to take Tornoe’s statement as my assumption going forward, though I do note that the evidence in support of it is all from the first year of the current contract and the one piece of firm evidence since then, while flimsy, works against it. But I’m still going to work under the assumption that the deadline is still “when the decision has to be made” for early flexes, which is going to come into play right away.

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.

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Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 8 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Week 8 (SNF early flex ): Earlier this week the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe reported that the NFL was considering flexing out Eagles-Quinns from the Week 8 Sunday Night Football slot. While I briefly considered starting the full-size Flex Schedule Watch a week earlier than planned to accommodate this, ultimately I was content to let this serve as the extent of my analysis:

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The Pros and Cons of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Process Overhaul

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Two years after the introduction of the biggest change to its selection process since at least 2004, on Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced what may be the biggest change to its selection process ever.

Much like the 2024 changes, these changes have two main components to them. First, the main selection committee is being reduced in size from 50 members to 28, three of which will be designated nonvoting participants each year. This means it is no longer possible for there to be representatives for each of the 32 NFL teams, as was the case with the prior makeup of the selection committee; all 27 selectors (outside the representative of the Pro Football Writers of America) will be chosen at large.

The bigger change, though, at least from the perspective of fans, is the elimination of the Senior category. All players, regardless of how long they have been retired, will be considered in a single pool. 13 players will be named as finalists and be considered alongside one coach and one contributor, each chosen by subcommittees. (In one sense, this is something of a return to the status quo prior to the centennial class of 2020, when coaches moved through the same selection process as players.) The definition of a contributor is also expanding to encompass candidates’ “full football resume that may include playing, coaching and other contributions to the sport”; I don’t know if that effectively serves as a way to create a potential 14th player or coach slot, or if this is just a way of sanctioning something like Doug Williams’ inclusion in the 2025 contributor process (and also potentially making it easier for influential assistant coaches like Clark Shaughnessy to find a way in).

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Assessing the 2026 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This is one of the most bizarre NFL schedules I can remember, certainly since I started sorting games into “tiers” before the schedule release. There are several reasons for this that I’ll get into as we go along, but perhaps the biggest is that, despite neither the Bengals nor Jaguars qualifying for Tier 1, no fewer than four games that could have ended up in Tier 1 did not end up in featured windows (admittedly with two of them involving the Chargers, which has two games falling into Tier 2) – the most eyebrow-raising of which must certainly be Ravens-Bills Week 8. The two quarterbacks that squared off for the 2024 MVP, who put on an overtime thriller on Sunday night last year, get a 1 PM ET game when I would have thought it would have been one of the most coveted games for the network partners to put in featured windows?

“You could put Baltimore-Buffalo in any of our primetime packages and any one of our partners would have been thrilled to get it, and you might’ve had 18 or 20 million people watching that game,” Mike North said on a Friday conference call. “As a 1 o’clock anchor for CBS, it may get 75% of the country. You might have more people watching that game Sunday on CBS at 1 o’clock than you might have if it was on Monday night or Thursday night. It reaffirms our commitment to keeping Sunday afternoon strong.”

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What the 2026 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Thursday, and as I’ve done the last two years, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, 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.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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Tipping Picks Is a Rejection of the NFL’s Potemkin Draft

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A few days before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft, Peter Schrager took to his podcast and social media to beg viewers to stay off social media and not spoil themselves with each pick. Part of his argument was that reporters who get the pick before it’s announced aren’t actually doing anything special:

It’s because the NFL requires that name to be sent to them, and the entire league gets that name three minutes before the pick is made. Anyone who’s got a credential has one source in the league, and that one source in the league, whether it be from the 32 teams or the league office or an agent, they have access to the picks 90 seconds before they’re announced. There is no valor in spoiling an NFL draft pick, so don’t give that joy or that “attaboy” to those who are leaking it beforehand.

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2026 Cantonmetrics Offseason Snapshot: What Will the Hall of Fame’s Reaction Be to the Belichick Backlash?

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Congratulations to Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Luke Kuechly, Adam Vinatieri, and Roger Craig on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2025 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.

Most of the tables I’d previously included in this post are now part of the Cantonmetrics spreadsheet, so you can refer there to see the highest-Monitor active players, the players that didn’t play this season, and the updated list of modern-era candidates (although I may end up making changes to how I update the spreadsheet at the end of the season considering how long it took, though being distracted by the Olympics didn’t help). The spreadsheet does not include the Players to Watch, though, as that’s much more a product of a specific moment in time, so this post will contain that, some high-level thoughts on this year’s induction process, and other relevant points in bullet point form.

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Did the NFL Get the Week 18 Schedule Right?

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Heading into this past Sunday, there was concern that Week 18 of the NFL season would be a complete dud. The Lions and Colts had already been eliminated by the Lions losing and Texans winning, meaning all the potential wild card teams were already in the playoffs and the only spots remaining to be determined were the winners of the NFC South and AFC North, and if the Steelers, Panthers, and Dolphins all won, all 14 playoff teams would be determined through Week 17 with only seeding left to be settled.

In the end, that did not end up happening. The Browns pulled the upset over the Steelers, the Seahawks had a fairly dominating win over the Panthers, and the NFL had a veritable surfeit of games that it could put in its standalone windows, with the two remaining playoff spots to be decided by division title games in Panthers-Bucs and Ravens-Steelers. I’m not titling this post “Week 18 Schedule Post-Mortem” because when I did that it was in the aftermath of an almost indefensible schedule (and the time before that involved me needing to recalibrate my expectations), and that’s not what happened here. I predicted the schedule more or less completely accurately, with Panthers-Bucs on Saturday and Ravens-Steelers as the Sunday night game. This despite the fact that right up until the Week 18 schedule was actually announced at the end of the Bears-Niners game, there were a number of people on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter absolutely convinced that the Sunday night game would be Seahawks-Niners.

This was absolutely astounding to me. I had been pretty much convinced that as long as the AFC North division title game was an option, it would get the nod for Sunday night – it had all the advantages in terms of stakes, name value, and storylines. Yet as the Sunday night game went on I actually started second-guessing myself and seeing the case for Seahawks-Niners to get the nod. In the end, the original logic I went by won out and I couldn’t help but celebrate a little even as I was no longer sure it was the right move. Certainly many of the people who expected Seahawks-Niners to get the nod, rather than simply admitting they were wrong, moaned that the league had made a mistake. So in this post I’m going to break down exactly why the league set the schedule as they did by looking at every argument made in favor of Seahawks-Niners and why they fell flat.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16

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It’s the last Flex Scheduling Watch of the year, the end of what has been a wild and unpredictable NFL regular season, and a much more interesting potential Week 18 schedule than we had last year. It’s also the end of a Flex Schedule Watch season that saw me experiment with the format of this feature, and the results have left me torn.

This year I rolled out new HTML tables to replace the old static images accompanying each week’s analysis, but thanks to WordPress’ sketchy table support, I accomplished very few of the goals I had hoped the new format would achieve. I had to manually edit each table’s HTML to get it to look the way I wanted, and not only did that lead to me still using the classic editor for the body of the post, I resorted to including custom CSS classes WordPress normally only uses for images in the classic editor to get the body text to look nice on mobile. Even then, after the Packers-Cowboys tie, the table didn’t quite fit right on mobile, in some cases even after I reduced the font size of the Packers and Cowboys’ records. On top of that, when I attempted to comment out games that were just on the wrong side of the borderline to appear in the table so I wouldn’t have to recreate those games’ rows from scratch if the teams in them started winning again, WordPress inserted massive amounts of blank space between each line in the commented-out section (lines WordPress created itself between each cell), which I had to clean up each time I wanted to update those games.

The end result was that, while the tables might have played nicer with screen readers, the main effect on my end was to increase the amount of work involved for little benefit. Even with all of that, though, the biggest reason I might ditch the tables is that WordPress interprets the hexadecimal codes in the HTML, which determines what color the right-hand column should be if it’s to fill the role of the Buzzmeter, as hashtags, resulting in the bottom of each post being filled with gobbledygook, and I don’t know if there’s any way to get it to stop.

And yet, there are some benefits to me that make me reluctant to ditch the tables entirely and go back to the static images. For one thing, the static images could sometimes be a pain to update themselves as I move games back and forth, especially with how borders interact with images and row heights in Excel. The former meant I had to create boxes separate from the actual cells to keep each game separate, which didn’t always move with the game they were supposed to; the latter meant that every cell in a row had to have the same width of their top and bottom borders, restricting my ability to arrange everything and requiring some weeks to be placed in a completely different set of rows from the others. The space I allocated for notes was also an awkward fit, and as more and more constraints made themselves apparent, became increasingly inadequate; if I do go back to static images, I’m probably going to rearrange some things to create more note space. And this is a relatively minor consideration, but I really like how the team logo images I created turned out and it would be a shame if I didn’t have any use for them after this season.

I might play around a little bit with table formatting after the season ends and see if there are some other ways to overcome these issues, or if updating to a new WordPress version or adding an add-on would help with hex codes being interpreted as tags, or if an add-on might make the whole process of editing the tables easier. If I can’t get it to be worth the effort, I’ll probably switch back to a modified version of the static images I was using before, but I might incorporate elements of this format in the new version.

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 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 this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in 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. 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 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. 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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 15

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The Jacksonville Jaguars are the red-headed stepchild of the NFL.

The league’s decision to put an expansion franchise in Jacksonville was considered questionable even in 1995 – the expansion group had actually pulled themselves out of the running a year earlier – and might not have happened if St. Louis had an ownership group that had its act together, with Jacksonville being announced a full month after the Carolina Panthers. Any expectation that Jacksonville would grow large enough to justify the league’s investment didn’t pan out to the degree needed, and today, the Jaguars not only represent the fourth-smallest market in the league, but in all of professional sports – but unlike New Orleans, Buffalo, and Green Bay, don’t get to rely on a significant chunk of their state to pull in fans, and have never gotten the chance to pull in a significant fanbase beyond that.

For many years, the only thing keeping the Jags from being in the running to move to Los Angeles seemed to be a 30-year lease with an ironclad clause making it basically impossible to terminate it early, and the Jags seemed to be running out the clock until the lease ran out and they could move to a bigger market, especially once they effectively made London their second home. That ended once Shad Khan bought the team and committed to keeping the team in Jacksonville, eventually securing a new stadium deal, but one that, according to polls, residents of the city aren’t entirely happy with. Jacksonville has embraced the Jaguars more than Las Vegas has embraced the Raiders (#LARaidersVegasChargers), and there are plenty of worse markets when it comes to fan passion, but the team still doesn’t pull the numbers you’d want to justify having a team in a market of its size. (In the year the linked tweet covers, the three teams in smaller markets than the Jaguars all drew more than double the household rating, including the Packers in Milwaukee.)

As far as the league is concerned, the Jaguars seem to be the team they regret, the team with the smallest fanbase and the least amount of juice to justify putting them in featured windows. Over the last three years, the only Tier 1 games not to be placed in featured windows other than Ravens-Bengals have been Jaguars games in 2023, including a game against the mighty Chiefs the league evidently considered the most disposable of the Chiefs’ games against quality opponents. Last week the league announced two flexes in three days, and in both cases they passed up games involving the 9-4 Jaguars for flexing. Each decision was at least somewhat explicable on its own – maybe Fox protected Jaguars-Broncos over Chargers-Cowboys figuring the league wouldn’t flex in the latter, maybe there’s a rule prohibiting the Broncos from being flexed into Sunday night the week before a Thursday road game, maybe the prospect of Colts-Texans being a Saturday game Week 18 made the league rule out flexing in Jaguars-Colts (to say nothing of the Colts playing on Monday night the previous week, which was an oversight for me not to note on the table at any point). But on the surface, taken together, they sent an unmistakable message about just how little the league and its network partners see the Jaguars.

When I link new posts on Mastodon and Bluesky, I go beyond simply posting the title of each post and instead write short blurbs teasing and previewing them. For last week’s Flex Schedule Watch post, I said that the week’s developments seemed to show that the Jaguars were the Bizarro Cowboys: whereas the Cowboys would never be flexed out of primetime, the Jaguars were doomed never to be flexed in. The last time the Jaguars were flexed into a featured window still felt like a slap in the face: a Titans-Jaguars division title game punted to ESPN on Saturday of Week 18 in favor of a Lions-Packers game where the Lions were at risk of being, and were, eliminated before game time. I don’t know if the Jaguars have ever been flexed into primetime where there was an existing tentative game.

To be sure, it’s not that it’s surprising that the league treats the Jags as ratings poison; I’ve effectively kept the Jags out of the running for flex spots even when their record would otherwise justify it. As far as I can tell, before this month I’d only once predicted a Jaguars game would be flexed into primetime: Week 8 of 2023, and that was under the assumption that Fox would protect Rams-Cowboys. The league decided to stick with a game involving a 1-5 Bears team, and just like with last week’s flexes, the decision was explicable on its own, if only because flexing in any game other than Rams-Cowboys would have involved some crossflexes between networks, and the league had other options that were clearly better than the tentative, so it’s possible the league just didn’t want to deal with the logistical hurdles any flex would involve. That convinced me that the league would never use an early flex for any reason other than a star player being hurt, only for that to be disproven the following year when the league flexed out a game involving… the Jaguars. But now I have to wonder: how much of this decision was because the league wanted to avoid flexing in the Jags, which boasted the best available alternative game, at all costs?

I’ve said before that the league’s claims that flex scheduling means that teams can “play their way into primetime” was a sick joke for some teams that had much higher hurdles to “play their way into primetime” than others. But it may well be that for the Jaguars, it’s an out-and-out lie.

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 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 this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in 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. 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 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. 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.

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