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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:

Not sure how much stock to put into this tidbit. I’ve basically given up on anything beyond "protections are due basically whenever it’s time for the league to make a decision". Might be able to look back over the current contract and find reason to justify this though. https://t.co/NkcHqgB9ws

— Morgan Wick (@morganwick) October 13, 2026

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Mike North implies, and Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill confirms, that the universal Week 5 deadline for protections is no longer in effect under the new contract, with Mulvihill stating “without revealing too much it’s now significantly closer to each game date“.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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Week 8 (SNF early flex #1): 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:

This is where the NFL flex scheduling rules suck CBS automatically gets to protect Chiefs/Broncos and Browns/Steelers because the first game did not air on their network, so it can’t be that FOX automatically gets to protect Lions/Vikings because the second game is on SNF and won’t air on their network, so it can’t be that CBS will protect Bills/Ravens as their one game FOX will protect Jets/Raiders as their one game That means you’re stuck with only 6 possible options for the flex, where of those 6, the best option is Colts vs Jaguars, and spoiler alert, they’re not flexing out an NFC East rivalry for Colts/Jags There are way too many protections baked in

— JaguarGator9 (@JaguarGator9NFL) October 13, 2026

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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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Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Christmas day games.

Here’s something I could have put in this section last week but didn’t: last week Mike Tirico appeared on Jimmy Traina’s podcast and suggested the league adopt a Premier League-style scheduling model for the last month or so of the season, where games are complete free agents only assigned to windows and networks when the time comes to make flex decisions on each one. Tirico thinks “it would really benefit everybody to just kind of put placeholders in”, but realistically I don’t think the networks would stand for that depending on where they are in the pecking order for choosing games. (I’d think what he really meant was that it would benefit his employer specifically, except that of the three featured windows on Sunday and Monday last week, NBC was probably most satisfied with what they got.) The doubleheader network would still get priority for their late afternoon game, but all the other half-decent games would be siphoned away to other networks. Networks care about their 1 PM ET windows too, and at the very least the singleheader network needs a good game of some kind; this approach would basically amount to abolishing protections, and maybe even the division rivalry rule, in the last month of the season.

The league pretended this was how it worked in the first year of flex scheduling in 2006, listing all Sunday games at 1 PM, 4:05 PM, or 4:25 PM ET based solely on what time zone the game was being played in and (for West Coast games) whether the network it would be on under the old rigid road-team-based rules had the singleheader or doubleheader, implying the best of the unprotected games would go to NBC. In reality, NBC always had a tentative game penciled in, and in 2007 and subsequent years this tentative game was marked in the schedule from the start. All the networks want some idea of what games they’re going to get, if only to promote them for advertisers.

I don’t think the situation we had last week would have gone much better if this “free agent” system was in place but the Saturday games were still fixed, Fox was still guaranteed Eagles-Swing States, and they could still protect Vikings-Seahawks. If Broncos-Chargers still got flexed to TNF in mid-November, the three best games available two weeks out would have actually been the three games that were already in the featured windows. Now, you could argue that’s a sign of the league’s hubris in taking the Netflix deal and adding two more featured windows to the four it already had, but it still points to how the protection and division-rivalry rules are the real obstacles here to creating a decent, balanced schedule, and how if the league can’t solve that problem, the only solution is to take more care in constructing the schedule in May.

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.

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Note: This post (mostly) does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game.

I said on Twitter that I wanted to get this out on Thursday even if I completed the percentage chances for the Sunday night games before then because I wanted to see if I could calculate percentage chances for the Saturday games, and I managed to get the Sunday games done on Tuesday morning, but then I dilly-dallied on actually writing the post until Friday morning, doing no work on the Saturday games in the meantime. Oops. Not a good sign for my ability to work on other posts I told myself I was going to work on after the election. If the Sunday situation was as convoluted as it’s been in some other recent years this might be another situation where I don’t get the post in at all; luckily there are very few games in the running for Sunday night in Week 18 and a couple of clear favorites (and even calculating the strength of victory situation for the Seahawks, while tedious, was relatively straightforward). It’s the flex decisions that were already made this week where the action is.

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.

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All right, let’s start the Flex Schedule Watch for real this time! I wrote most of this post this morning but held off on posting it to see if there would be a change in the Week 8 schedule, and sure enough Bears-Windbags will switch places with Eagles-Bengals and the showdown of big-market star rookie quarterbacks will now be the main late doubleheader game. As I explain below, I may have screwed up a little last week in a way that underestimated the chances for certain games being flexed out, but I still don’t think they’re particularly likely – and our best chance for a flex may well come from Thursday night. This despite the fact that the Browns may well almost be trying to get flexed out of their primetime games.

I’m hoping I’ve gotten things arranged such that your comments should only need to be approved once, but if not I’m going to have to try another anti-spam plugin. I’m also finding the post is getting smushed on mobile as text is no longer automatically clearing the images; if I can’t find a solution for that I may have to adopt another format next year.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

• Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
• Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
• Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
• CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
• Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
• No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
• Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
• In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
• Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Read more