SNF Flex Scheduling Watch

As someone put it on the 506sports Discord, we may have a 4-8 vs. 4-8 flex-eligible primetime game because of a cartoon sitcom.

On Monday Disney released another trailer for their “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast of the Week 14 Monday night game, seemingly doubling down on that game remaining Bengals-Cowboys. Shortly afterward, a Bengals beat writer tweeted that the game is ineligible to be flexed out due to all the work that has gone into the various art assets that would be used on the broadcast. Even considering the source I’m not sure I buy that it literally can’t be moved, but it’s pretty clear that Disney doesn’t want to back out of Bengals-Cowboys, and flexing it out would effectively cancel the alt-cast as reconfiguring it to work with another game would not be possible.

This likely all started with Disney not getting another Sunday morning European game this year, with its ESPN+ game instead forming part of a Monday night “doubleheader”. The previous “Toy Story Funday Football” alt-cast was associated with a European game that wasn’t subject to flexing, and if this had been in the works for long enough the idea may have been that this would be too. ESPN had explicitly said that the ESPN+ game would be an international game when the contracts were announced so I don’t think they would have backed away from that if Disney themselves didn’t want to (then again, I could say the same about Fox’s “as the schedule allows” Christmas games considering next year Christmas falls on a Thursday and the league could schedule two Christmas games with neither one on Fox), but nonetheless it was a change that may have left the people behind the alt-cast scrambling.

In retrospect, Disney probably should have chosen a game for the alt-cast that fell outside the flexible scheduling window and not run the risk of the game being flexed out, or at least not put themselves in the position where the league might want to flex the game out. But Bengals-Cowboys must have seemed like a pretty safe bet if the decision was made before the season or even in September. Disney surely observed the league’s practice of “Cowboys uber alles” over the last decade and a half, where Cowboys games would never be flexed out of Sunday nights even in situations where they absolutely would be for any other team, and figured that would apply here too. And hey, not only are the Cowboys always relevant in the Dak Prescott era, they’re playing the Bengals and Joe Burrow, who should always be contenders. So it may technically be flexible, but it’s not really flexible, is it?

Well, things haven’t worked out that way. The Bengals got out to what initially seemed like another slow start, something they haven’t been strangers to in the Burrow era, but have never really caught fire the way they have in years past, and after yet another blown lead against the Chargers their playoff hopes may be hanging by a thread. Against the Cowboys, that might not normally be enough to be flexed out. But the Cowboys aren’t just bad; with Prescott done for the season, they may well be actively tanking at this point, giving up on the season entirely. And Cowboys or no Cowboys, why would the league want to put on a team that isn’t even trying?

Perhaps the worst thing about it is, if the alt-cast really is preventing the league from flexing the game out, it’s not even a viable data point for where the bar is to flex out a Cowboys game. It’s a case where both teams could have poor records and be out of playoff contention, which has rarely been the case for past bad Cowboys games, but unlike with the one Cowboys game that did get flexed out, there shouldn’t be a risk that both teams will be eliminated from the playoffs entirely by the time the game kicks off, so there’s no way of knowing whether that situation would be enough for a flex in the future. We may never know if the only reason Bengals-Cowboys shows up on ESPN’s air in two and a half weeks is for the sake of an alt-cast that should get a fraction of the game’s audience.

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.

Read more

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

Underscoring my continued struggles with finding something to put in the opening section, I had this mostly written on Tuesday, and even had an idea for what to put here, but I’m not writing the opening section until early Friday morning. Not helping matters is that the thing I was going to put here had to do with my screwing up multiple times when putting together this week’s graphics; forgetting that I intended to extend one of the weekly graphics down a row, so you’ll see me talk about the prospect of flexing a game that’s not on the graphic to TNF, and updating the wild card standings for the result of the Dolphins-Rams game but not the division standings, so those aren’t accurate. I actually re-did the Week 17 graphic because I’d forgotten that I’ve only done one row of the Sunday options that week, and the games I’ve been storing in the second row aren’t necessarily the games I would feature in a proper post including that row.

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.

Read more

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

After I mentioned the multitude of 2-win teams last week more people from outside our little corner of the NFL galaxy have taken notice; maybe it’s because the Titans and Panthers winning means the 2-7 teams are now tied for last place, or maybe it’s because they more than outweighed the Jets winning to make the number just a little bit bigger. I already said all I needed to say about that last week (though my Browns-make-a-run-with-Winston prediction isn’t looking too hot), so all I’ll say now is that having more two-win teams and having them be in last place makes putting together the graphics all the more difficult. It’s also striking to note that the 2-6 Titans (and Dolphins) make the “waiting in the wings” section of the AFC playoff picture, yet there are still four AFC teams absent from there because they’re at 2-7.

I think this week I’ve run into the limitations of this opening section. It worked well last year when I kept getting insights into the league’s thought process nearly every week (even if those insights have increasingly proven useless), and also when I had a point to make about a specific team that spanned multiple weeks of the main flex period. But now, with Bengals-Chargers being flexed in for Colts-Jets, we’ve gotten a flex decision that has wide-ranging consequences for how I approach this feature going forward, and I’m hesitant to say anything up here because that might not leave me with much to say for the week’s actual post-mortem section – though I will say that by the end of this season, I may have radically re-calibrated my expectations for when and how the league will pull the flex. More on that after the jump.

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.

Read more

We’ve reached an odd point in the season: on paper there’s a decently clear divide between the good or at least mediocre teams and the bad ones, and there are enough bad teams, and feisty ones among them, that they can beat up on each other and catch some teams on a bad day and form an amorphous mass with no clear separation. There are a whopping eight teams with two wins, seven of them at 2-6, but only two, the Titans and Panthers, with only one win and three teams at three wins.

Not all of these teams are created equal; the Dolphins, our one 2-5 team, lost Tua Tagovailoa for much of the season to this point to yet another concussion, while the Browns just stunned the Ravens in their first game with Jameis Winston at quarterback, suggesting losing their $230 million signal-caller could prove to be the best thing to happen to their season. The same could be said for the three-win teams; the Cowboys may be entering a season from hell, while the Rams seem to have suffered nothing worse than “going through the entirety of the best division in football in their first seven games” and picked up a win over the previously-5-1 Vikings at the end of it. With the Bengals, on the other hand, it’s not clear which is the case; it had looked like they might have righted the ship, but then they suffered a blowout loss to the Eagles that had previously seemed to be in their own disarray.

I bring all this up because it makes putting together the graphics on this post difficult if there aren’t four games outside the featured windows involving only teams with three or more wins. For this post I’ve largely emphasized the divisions with the weakest leaders, the NFC South and West, where the teams below .500 are closer to the playoffs than other teams that might seem to have achieved similar levels of success (or lack thereof). That mostly means the Saints, but I’ve also tried to put some spotlight on the Browns in case they go on a run with Winston (certainly the networks airing their featured-window games I mentioned last week hope so).

(As an aside, it’s odd that WordPress’ block editor involves making images completely separate blocks from the surrounding paragraphs, yet images that are aligned to the side no longer force those paragraphs below them on mobile, even if there isn’t enough space for even a single word when it tries to wrap the text around the image. I’ve converted the bulk of the rest of the post to use the classic editor to attempt to get around this, but it’s clunky and doesn’t seem to work well if I save the post as a draft and attempt to come back to it later.)

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

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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. 

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Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday or Saturday night games.

Perhaps predictably, over the past week social media has erupted with people moaning about why Dolphins-Ravens, the game likely to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, is trapped in the early singleheader, why it wasn’t moved to 4:25 or Sunday night. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in recent years, and CBS sure is trying its best to show it to as much of the country as possible, but it is notable that even leaving aside the jockeying between networks and the increased protections CBS and Fox get in the new contracts, this game could have easily been moved to the late afternoon and stayed on CBS. Instead, before any of last week’s games were even played CBS opted to stick with the Burrow-less disappointing Bengals against the Chiefs. Lo and behold, once the week’s results played out the Bengals’ win streak with Jake Browning at quarterback had come to an abrupt halt, leaving the Bengals hanging on to the possibility of a playoff spot by a thread, and the Chiefs had stumbled to the Raiders, keeping the silver and black’s own threadbare playoff hopes alive and nearly locking the Chiefs into the 3 seed, especially when coupled with Dolphins and Ravens wins against two of the best teams in the NFC.

It’s a reminder that as much as the NFL has a nationalized fanbase, the people who want to watch the best, most important games between the best teams, at least in the regular season, are still a distinct minority compared to those that just want to watch the teams they’re fans of or the most attractive, biggest-name teams. A Chiefs game this year always carries the possibility of a Taylor Swift bump, but even without the Swift factor the Chiefs are one of the three most attractive teams in the league right now, by far the most attractive in the AFC, the most dominant team in the league in recent years with some of its biggest stars. They’re not the Cowboys – if the Chiefs-Patriots game that got flexed out earlier this year for Eagles-Seahawks had been Cowboys-Patriots I think it keeps its spot – but they are one of those teams that can pop a rating by their mere presence. On the flip side, let’s not forget that the Dolphins produced one of the worst December Sunday Night Football ratings ever when they were flexed in down the stretch of last season – contributing to the league’s decision to plug Lions-Packers into Sunday night of Week 18 instead of a game that wouldn’t become meaningless for one team by the time it kicked off. Couple that with the Bengals and Chiefs still being very much in the playoff hunt, and that’s why my prediction last week was that if Dolphins-Ravens was going to be moved to a later time at all, it would be into Sunday night, not the late afternoon window.

That being said, while the games scheduled for featured windows before the season are determined as much by popularity as by how they’re expected to perform, the flexible scheduling regime is still governed by how good the teams are. The game originally scheduled for a primetime window will keep its spot unless there’s a compelling reason to move out of it, but if it is flexed out the game that replaces it will generally be determined by what game has the best pair of records, and there have been times when a passable game scheduled for Sunday night has nonetheless been flexed out in favor of a game that seemed to be too good to be as weakly distributed as it otherwise would have been. Mike North has repeatedly stated in recent seasons that the league wants to give every playoff team exposure in national windows before the playoffs so that audiences have some familiarity with the team before the playoffs hit – obscure, unpopular, yet good teams aren’t going to become more popular if they continue to languish in obscurity. So the NFL does try to put the best games in the best windows.

Well, Dolphins-Ravens ranked #4 on my list of Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t that I wrote before the season, where I even raised the prospect of it being flexed in for Packers-Vikings. In my tier structure based on preseason win totals at sportsbooks I introduced a few weeks ago, it was a Tier 2 game, meaning if the best games of the year were distributed evenly, it would be the second-best game of its week. Given the poor ratings for the Dolphins on SNF last year and the perception that the AFC North was still the Bengals’ to lose, I can’t completely fault the league for not putting the game in a featured window to begin with, but I can fault the league for scheduling it this late in the season but punting it to the early doubleheader while giving the Sunday night timeslot to a game involving a Packers team expected to finish below .500, New Year’s Eve or no. The league had to be aware that if things played out exactly as expected, CBS would have two games between big-time playoff contenders with win totals no lower than 9.5 while SNF would have a game involving a team on the fringes of the playoff picture at best, yet because CBS was scheduled for only eight Chiefs appearances the league wouldn’t be able to flex either one in. To be sure, the league and CBS couldn’t have figured that, while CBS would have the game between the AFC’s two best teams, it wouldn’t be the one they thought it’d be. Still, I feel like while the league and its TV partners can mess around with games involving popular teams for the first three months of the season, once December hits they need to stop messing around. If the flexible windows don’t contain what are expected to be the best games of their respective weeks, not counting games in featured inflexible windows, then the games that are the best need to be in a position where they can be flexed in, period. At the very least, if they’re serious about “playing your way into primetime” they need to minimize the risk of something like this happening.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night or Saturday games (mostly).

So despite my use of a “cheat sheet” after what happened in 2021 this post came pretty close to going the same way. I’m inclined to blame it on the problems I ran into trying to fly to Seattle, but I still didn’t spend any time working on this on Friday. Maybe I should see if I can find a way to start working on this another week in advance? But the combinations involved multiply exponentially another week out.

One thing that occurred to me while I was working on the Week 17 section (before Thursday’s news) was that the eight-game minimum that applied to Cowboys games on Fox almost certainly doesn’t apply across the board. Only eleven out of 30 teams on my primetime appearance count list were scheduled to air on their respective conference’s network more than eight times, which would severely limit the league’s ability to pull the flex; notably, the Seahawks are among the teams scheduled for only eight Fox games, so flexing them in for Chiefs-Patriots would seem to have put them below the minimum. It had always been reported that CBS and Fox could choose a certain number of teams to air a minimum number of times on their air, but without any firm measure of what those numbers are I think there was a tendency to assume that the former number would apply across the board just to simplify things, avoid having to figure out what those teams were, and align with CBS and Fox maintaining their overall conference affiliations (and I think some things some executives said may have contributed to that perception), but clearly there is a discretionary element involved here. (That said, I suspect there is a smaller minimum that does apply across the board.) Eight games makes sense as the overall minimum to apply to the teams the networks choose, and the number of teams they can choose is probably pretty low for the Steelers to be scheduled for only seven CBS games, but even before Swiftmania came to Kansas City the Chiefs were probably one of the teams CBS did choose, which has relevance to the Week 17 flex because it removes any remaining doubt that they protected Dolphins-Ravens.

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, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Read more