NFL

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 5

by

NBC’s Sunday Night Football package gives it flexible scheduling. For the last seven weeks of the season, the games are determined on 12-day notice, 6-day notice for Week 17.

The first year, no game was listed in the Sunday Night slot, only a notation that one game could move there. Now, NBC lists the game it “tentatively” schedules for each night. However, the NFL is in charge of moving games to prime time.

Here are the rules from the NFL web site (note that this was written with the 2007 season in mind, hence why it still says late games start at 4:15 ET instead of 4:25):

  • Begins Sunday of Week 11
  • In effect during Weeks 11-17
  • Only Sunday afternoon games are subject to being moved into the Sunday night window.
  • The game that has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday night during flex weeks will be listed at 8:15 p.m. ET.
  • The majority of games on Sundays will be listed at 1:00 p.m. ET during flex weeks except for games played in Pacific or Mountain Time zones which will be listed at 4:05 or 4:15 p.m. ET.
  • No impact on Thursday, Saturday or Monday night games.
  • The NFL will decide (after consultation with CBS, FOX, NBC) and announce as early as possible the game being played at 8:15 p.m. ET. The announcement will come no later than 12 days prior to the game. The NFL may also announce games moving to 4:05 p.m. ET and 4:15 p.m. ET.
  • Week 17 start time changes could be decided on 6 days notice to ensure a game with playoff implications.
  • The NBC Sunday night time slot in “flex” weeks will list the game that has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday night.
  • Fans and ticket holders must be aware that NFL games in flex weeks are subject to change 12 days in advance (6 days in Week 17) and should plan accordingly.
  • NFL schedules all games.
  • Teams will be informed as soon as they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.
  • Rules NOT listed on NFL web site but pertinent to flex schedule selection: CBS and Fox each protect games in five out of six weeks, and cannot protect any games Week 17. Games were protected after Week 4 last year as well as the first year of flexible scheduling, because NBC hosted Christmas night games those years and all the other games were moved to Saturday (and so couldn’t be flexed), but are otherwise protected after Week 5.
  • In the past, three teams could appear a maximum of six games in primetime on NBC, ESPN or NFL Network (everyone else gets five) and no team may appear more than four times on NBC. I don’t know how the expansion of the Thursday Night schedule affects this, if it does. No team starts the season completely tapped out at any measure; eight teams have five primetime appearances each, but only the Broncos and Bears don’t have at least one game that can be flexed out. NBC appearances for all teams: DAL 3 (1 flexible), NYG 3 (1 flexible), PIT 3 (1 flexible), DEN 2, DET 2 (1 flexible), SF 2 (1 flexible), NE 3 (1 flexible), BAL 2 (1 flexible), PHI 2 (1 flexible), SD 2 (1 flexible), NO 2, GB 3 (2 flexible), HOU 2, CIN 1, ATL 1, CHI 1, NYJ 2 (1 flexible). All primetime appearances for all teams: DAL 4 (1 flexible), NYG 5 (1 flexible), PIT 5 (1 flexible), DEN 5, DET 4 (1 flexible), SF 5 (1 flexible), NE 4 1 flexible), BAL 4 (1 flexible), PHI 5 (1 flexible), SD 5 (1 flexible), NO 4, GB 5 (2 flexible), HOU 4, CIN 3, ATL 4, CHI 5, NYJ 4 (1 flexible), OAK 2, SEA 2, ARI 2, KC 2, CAR 2, TEN 2, all other teams 1.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Week 11 (November 18):

  • Tentative game: Baltimore @ Pittsburgh
  • Prospects: 4-1 v. 2-2; one of the hottest rivalries in the NFL, but are the Steelers more like those two losses than those two wins?
  • Likely protections: Cardinals-Falcons (FOX) and Chargers-Broncos or Jets-Rams if anything (CBS).
  • Other possible games: Colts-Patriots and the unprotected game(s), with Eagles-Redskins as a dark horse.

Week 12 (November 25):

  • Tentative game: Green Bay @ NY Giants
  • Prospects: 3-2 v. 2-3; a pair of name teams, but both look a little questionable so far, especially the Packers.
  • Likely protections: Vikings-Bears or Rams-Cardinals if anything (FOX) and Ravens-Chargers (CBS).
  • Other possible games: Thanksgiving Weekend, paucity of good games. Besides whatever game Fox doesn’t protect, Seahawks-Dolphins is a dark horse.

Week 13 (December 2):

  • Tentative game: Philadelphia @ Dallas
  • Prospects: Very iffy at 3-2 v. 2-2, but never count out an NFC East showdown.
  • Likely protections: 49ers-Rams or Vikings-Packers (FOX) and Steelers-Ravens (CBS).
  • Other possible games: Seahawks-Bears and whatever game Fox doesn’t protect, with Bengals-Chargers a dark horse.

Week 14 (December 9):

  • Tentative game: Detroit @ Green Bay
  • Prospects: The Lions look to have fallen back into their old morass at 1-3, and the Packers may not be that much better. This may be the likeliest game to lose its spot.
  • Likely protections: Bears-Vikings or Cardinals-Seahawks (FOX) and Chargers-Steelers or Ravens-Redskins (CBS), with either network possibly leaving the week unprotected.
  • Other possible games: Basically, whatever games aren’t protected.

Week 15 (December 16):

  • Tentative game: San Francisco @ New England
  • Prospects: 4-1 v. 3-2, possibly the tentative game in the best shape.
  • Likely protections: Broncos-Ravens, Colts-Texans, Steelers-Cowboys, or nothing (CBS) and Giants-Falcons (FOX).
  • Other possible games: Vikings-Rams, Packers-Bears, and the games CBS doesn’t protect.

Week 16 (December 23):

  • Tentative game: San Diego @ NY Jets
  • Prospects: 3-2 v. 2-3; somewhat mediocre, but who knows if the Jets will be driving the Tebow bandwagon by this point.
  • Likely protections: Vikings-Texans, Giants-Ravens, Bears-Cardinals, 49ers-Seahawks, or nothing (FOX) and Bengals-Steelers if anything (CBS).
  • Other possible games: Besides the unprotected games, Redskins-Eagles is a dark horse.

Week 17 (December 30):

  • Playoff positioning watch begins Week 9.

Update on my school year

by

Okay, I’ve clearly completely failed at managing my projects vis-a-vis actual schoolwork, because I’m tired all day and I’m falling horribly behind on it, despite the fact that I was trying to make one of my projects into schoolwork.

Obviously the FF50 challenge is a major timesuck, but there’s one or two other projects as well, which are actually starting to crowd out one another, and I’m not sure how to weed them out. I can’t abandon leagues much faster than I’m already doing; if I’m in contention for a playoff spot, let alone the championship, for me to then abandon my team would cause utter chaos. Already down to 42 leagues before I even started, I was thinking of dropping to 32 next year, and now I’m thinking even lower, because I have never put in all the roster moves I would have liked to before deadline.

Thoughts on the new baseball contracts coming Wednesday.

Why not even the Debacle in Seattle will bring the real refs back

by

By now you’ve heard all about the controversial play at the end of Monday night’s Packers-Seahawks game, the nadir of the NFL’s ongoing Replacementgate. With the entire country blowing up around it, surely this is the incident that forces the NFL’s hand and gets them to finally bring the lockout of the real refs to a conclusion.  Surely with the replacement refs backfiring so horribly, Roger Goodell has egg on his face and is desperately trying to end this before the replacement refs do any more damage, right?

Meanwhile, as many people are watching the games as ever.

The replacement refs backfired? On the contrary, everything is going exactly according to plan. Roger Goodell knows that the refs have zero impact on whether or not you watch. People don’t watch the NFL because the “integrity of the game” is so strong; hell, people watch pro wrestling knowing that it’s all staged. The NFL is first and foremost entertainment, the ultimate reality show; people watch for all the football action they’ve come to love, for the drama the sport brings, because their sense of self-worth is bound up in the fortunes of their favorite team, because of their fantasy players. Those things would have been affected by the arrival of replacement players, but with replacement officials the action is all the same, only the outcome is different. And ultimately, we don’t really care that much how the outcome is derived. It’s just one more thing for us to talk about around the watercooler.

And ultimately, that’s what the replacement refs debacle comes down to, and why Roger Goodell couldn’t be happier. It’s one more thing for the massive ecosystem of shows debating the NFL to discuss ad nauseam, one more way for the NFL to be at everyone’s lips at watercoolers around the country, a way that doesn’t involve the word “concussions” (a far bigger threat to the long-term viability of the NFL). That’s why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth for the real officials to come back simply leads Goodell to lean back in his chair, twiddle his fingers, and mutter “Excellent” like Mr. Burns.

Perhaps what happened in Seattle will cause some owners to start revolting and wondering whether the issues the NFL is holding its ground on in the lockout negotiations are really that big a priority that they justify what the league has turned into. But if it isn’t enough of them, the lockout will end when the real officials start feeling the very real pain of not collecting their checks, and not a moment sooner.

The Super Bowl XLVI lineal title was on the line in Monday night’s game. The Packers could very easily say they have a claim to it.

My picks for every NFL game this season

by

That’s right: I may not be doing the NFL schedule this season, but I am picking all 256 games, plus all 11 playoff games, before the season even starts. Winning teams are listed in bold. Lineal title holders are in italics.

Week 1:
Cowboys @ Giants
Colts @ Bears
Eagles @ Browns
Rams @ Lions
Dolphins @ Texans
Falcons @ Chiefs
Jaguars @ Vikings
Redskins @ Saints
Bills @ Jets
Patriots @ Titans
Seahawks @ Cardinals
49ers @ Packers
Panthers @ Bucs
Steelers @ Broncos
Bengals @ Ravens
Chargers @ Raiders

Read more

Setting the stage for the next week

by

My laptop is on its way to HP. Under the circumstances, it looks like I’m probably going to be working off Mom’s computer for all of next week, and maybe into the week after that.

The FF50 challenge looks to be in good shape. I may have to either move Tuesday’s drafts later, or move at least the noon one to 9 AM PT, due to various commitments, but other than that everything should proceed swimmingly, aside from Mom’s attempts to get me to do other, more productive things.

Naturally, after my promises to keep webcomic posts to a minimum while my laptop is getting fixed, next week may prove to be a rather webcomic-heavy week. QC and Homestuck definitely, Gunnerkrigg Court maybe. The HS post will be rather general in nature; I’m going to hold off on posting on Act 6 Intermission 3 probably until it’s over, intentionally this time, partly because of the three daisy-chained exploration non-flashes that either start or consist the intermission that are probably intended to form one long non-flash, partly because of how buggy it is still; even in the preferred Chrome browser on Mom’s computer, sometimes the sound will spontaneously shut off for no reason, so I’m going to wait until my computer comes back to go through the other non-flashes.

Between webcomics and other things, I have plenty of ideas to fill out the next week of posts already.

As if I wasn’t having enough trouble getting anything done this summer…

by

So, the frame of the screen of my laptop has become disconnected from the screen itself in one corner, AND one hinge has come loose, so I’m going to have to send it in to be repaired and that could take over a week.

The timing on this could not be worse as it jeopardizes the FF50 competition; I will probably have to do the drafts on my mom’s computer, if I do as many as I had planned at all, as Mom’s probably not going to be happy about me monopolizing the computer for large chunks of the day, especially when I could be doing more productive things.

Also, I’m going to be keeping my webcomics posts to a minimum over the course of the week. It’s unfortunate with the current events in Gunnerkrigg Court and Questionable Content that could become post-worthy soon, but it’s probably necessary.

Starting Da Blog’s 2012 football season with a whimper

by

It is with a heavy sigh that I have begun the process of preparing the site for the 2012 football season (last week’s fantasy draft didn’t count). I’ve been dreading this because of all the stuff I wanted to get done this summer that didn’t get done. Both lineal titles have their respective first games updated, and sometime before Thursday I’ll tweet out when you can expect the first rankings. Because of the Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge, those and the SNF Flex Schedule Watch may be the only things I do this year.

Shark League Draft Post-Mortem

by

You may recall I was feeling pretty sure of myself after the first two rounds of my FantasySharks League draft, when I had Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew in my possession.

That…feeling didn’t last. My next five picks ended up all being wide receivers, and I wound up drafting eight wideouts over the course of the entire draft. If Jones-Drew’s holdout doesn’t end and none of the injured running backs I picked are ready, I’ll only be able to play one running back Week 1. I have a hard time believing I’m going to have a worse draft when I fill out the other 49 teams over Labor Day Weekend.

It’s apparent that the lists I was relying on overemphasize wideouts so much compared to their Shark League value that it’s going to be difficult to correct for. Someone told me that the lack of trading in Shark Leagues has a bigger impact on the draft than I would have thought, effectively leading one to focus on drafting their starting lineup at the major positions in the first six picks, but I’m not fond of trading anyway, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I drafted a wideout in the first and third rounds and probably would have filled my entire bench with them thereafter. I’m now playing “Wide Receiver Survivor”, with my eight wideouts fighting not to be cut in the first few weeks in favor of free agents to shore up my situation at tight end, running back, and possibly quarterback, though it’s entirely possible Jay Cutler, who broke the run of wideouts in the eighth, could work out.

I joined the Shark Leagues to test how far my own “strategy”, to the extent it could be called such, could really take me. I now suspect that the rules of the leagues have been intentionally devised to attempt to weed out anyone remotely noobish, and undercut any crutches such as I might use. So I intend to stick with it another year, but I’m going to have to make some big changes to my strategy to allow it to hold up under the circumstances. Even then, I’m not sure it’s going to be enough.

Great, ANOTHER streak-filler post?

by

I was planning on writing a post wrapping up the Olympics in more ways than one… but my day became completely occupied with my fascination watching the FantasySharks drafts over the course of the day. And my own league wasn’t even part of it, being stuck at for over nine hours. I may have to consider the first day of the FantasySharks drafts a personal day for me from now on.

For the record, I think I’ve done pretty decently drafting so far (I’m 11th, so I get two picks pretty much one after the other). I’ve picked up Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew, and I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet because I came very close to spending my first two picks on wide receivers. (The Shark leagues are PPR leagues, but with two wideouts and no flex, so people are reticent to take wideouts too early. By the way, I feel like ESPN’s PPR rankings are the Matt Millen of PPR rankings; four wideouts in the first eight spots?) Regardless, despite the differences between fantasy and real football, anytime you pick up two players among the Top 50 resumes for the Hall of Fame, you must be doing something right. (If you want to follow the rest of my draft, I’m tweeting every pick and I might write a wrap-up when it’s done.)

That Olympics post may be up by the time you read this, or I may have scrapped the idea entirely because I wasn’t feeling it. Time will tell.

Introducing the Morgan Wick Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge!

by

Last year, I decided to carry out a project called the Simulated Experts’ Fantasy League. I’d take the “big boards” of eight prominent fantasy sites and draft an eight-team league using each of them, then play out a season. It was an interesting experiment, but not one I’d like to try again with. I intended to run a second league, the Simulated Experts’ Auction Fantasy League. This league would attempt to hold an auction using several sites that listed recommended auction values for players.

After waiting for sites to have as up-to-date and relevant big boards as I could, possibly too long (Yahoo never did release a big board that reflected the end of the Chris Johnson holdout), I held the SEFL draft all day on Wednesday, the day before the start of the season. On Thursday, I woke up intending to hold the auction draft… and found that NFL.com had replaced its big board with Week 1 rankings. And there was no way to get the big board back, even though you could still draft a team right up to kickoff of the Kickoff Game.

I looked frantically for some way to get the big board back. NFL.com’s fantasy system has a feature where you can enter a draft – not a mock draft, a real live draft – just by clicking some buttons. As I would find, it’s a devious way for them to suck people into their fantasy football product. I entered a draft room to find that I could, in fact, get the big board back that way… but of course, it didn’t have what I actually needed, the auction values, and NFL.com is only supporting actual auction leagues starting this year. Nonetheless, over the course of the time I spent in there, I wound up drafting a team.

It was a strangely engrossing experience, and I decided to run a team in as many sites as I could, but I was only able to draft a team on ESPN before the Kickoff Game started. I’ve said before that I tend to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing, that I tend not to be caught up in whatever the current trend is, but in retrospect it’s kind of surprising that I hadn’t taken up fantasy football before; it involves just the sort of obsessive ordering, sorting, and categorization that’s right up my alley. For someone like me, who isn’t really a fan of any particular team, it’s really the perfect way to follow the NFL. For much of last season I was actually considering doing a live online radio show every Sunday of this year where I keep track of the developments in one specific fantasy league, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

(For the record, my impression was that the people on NFL.com were more prone to make boneheaded mistakes and massive reach picks than the more knowledgeable drafters on ESPN… so naturally my NFL.com team did horribly while my ESPN team dominated the league after Cam Newton basically fell into my lap and I turned out to have something like the two best running backs in the league, propelling me all the way to the championship game before getting crushed.)

Now that I know for a fact what my opinion of fantasy football is, I intend to take it to the next level, and finish what I briefly started last year, by running as many teams as I possibly can – a total of a whopping fifty at the same time. Why? Because I’m apparently insane and have decided that, after a summer I’d earmarked as a critical one with a number of projects I intended to get done that wound up progressing slower than I would have liked, and heading into a hardcore quarter at school where I’ll be taking a class that’s both critical and might end up demanding the most work of any I’ve taken, the best thing for me to do is to take one of the major saps on my time last fall and increase the work involved in it fivefold.

One of these leagues will be one of the MyFantasyLeague.com leagues from FantasySharks.com, despite my having no intention of using the actual advice on their site much – their ranking on FantasyPros.com, one of the sites in the SEFL, doesn’t lie, though their draft advice is of some use. So why am I doing it? Because FantasySharks.com has come up with a brilliant idea that I’m not entirely sure why no one has tried before: bringing promotion and relegation to fantasy football. At the top is the “Great White Shark League”, a 12-team league consisting of nine users of the site, two of the site’s top experts, and an automated team. The bottom four teams get relegated to one of two “Whale Shark Leagues”, which similarly each contain nine users, two experts, and an automated team, with the champion and the team with the most total points promoted to the Great White Shark. Below that are four “Hammerhead” leagues containing all users, then eight “Mako” leagues, then 16 “Blue” leagues, then the current lowest level, the 32 “Tiger” leagues (though there is a possibility that a new “Leopard” level could be added this year).

I love this concept in every way, from the way it raises the stakes on every level to the most important reason I’m actually participating in it, its usefulness as a yardstick of ability and success. I’ve actually expanded this idea out to one of a championship pyramid for all of fantasy football, a good 20 levels following the same power-of-2 structure, complete with a new-player-qualification scheme so new players don’t have to wait a lifetime to reach the top. For the limited competition that’s there now, I’ll be starting in Tiger League 3 with a team with the whimsically nerdy name of the “Green Lantern Corps“.

For the other 49 teams, I’ll be drafting as many teams as I can on every single free fantasy football website. NFL.com has a maximum of six, CBS three, ESPN and Fox ten each. Yahoo and Fleaflicker have no limit, so ten teams on each of those sites brings me to an even 50. All of these drafts, except the FantasySharks league whose draft will start this Monday and has a 12-hour timer so it could last upwards of a week, will be held over Labor Day Weekend and in the run-up to kickoff. To reduce the effect on my time during the school year, I will stop actively maintaining any team that starts 0-4 or 1-5, but I will maintain at least one team on every site and under no circumstances will I abandon the Shark team. I’ll track my progress over the course of the season and give my quick impressions of each site as I go along, on Twitter and on Da Blog.

Here are the times I intend to hold the draft for each league. All times Pacific.

August 13:
6 AM: MyFantasyLeague/FantasySharks.com

September 1:
9 AM: NFL
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Fox
Noon: Yahoo
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: CBS
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fox
6 PM: Fleaflicker
7 PM: ESPN
8 PM: Yahoo

September 2:
9 AM: Yahoo
10 AM: Fox
11 AM: ESPN
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Fox
3 PM: CBS
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fleaflicker
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: NFL
8 PM: Fox

September 3:
9 AM: Fox
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Yahoo
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Yahoo
3 PM: Fox
4 PM: Fleaflicker
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: NFL
7 PM: CBS
8 PM: Fleaflicker

September 4:
Noon: ESPN
1 PM: Fox
2 PM: Fleaflicker
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: Fox
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: Fleaflicker
8 PM: NFL

September 5:
Noon: Fleaflicker
1 PM:  Yahoo
2 PM:  Fox
3 PM:  ESPN