90c000

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 10

by

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

On Sunday the Seahawks and Rams will square off in a game to determine not only the lead in the NFC West, but at minimum, no worse than a tie for the best record in the NFC. Multiple figures have been declaring it not only the game of the week but potentially the game of the year… and it’s trapped on the late singleheader. Its distribution outside the West Coast is a bit broader than simply the home markets of teams playing on CBS in the early window – also covering most of the secondary markets of those teams, or at least the ones in the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Buffalo axis – but probably the majority of unaligned markets will get Bears-Vikings in the early window.

Suffice to say, the Seahawks were not expected to be this good. Back in May, their win totals at sportsbooks was around 8.5 or even 7.5, so expectations were for them to finish around or even below .500, despite narrowly missing out on the playoffs and adding Sam Darnold coming off a near-MVP-level campaign. That was good enough for their games to qualify as Tier 6, but when I put together a graphic for the week’s games after the schedule came out, this game didn’t even crack the top four games not slated for featured windows, with Niners-Cardinals getting the nod for recognition on the graphic – in large part because Seahawks-Rams wasn’t going to be available for flexing (more on that later, and more info on my thoughts on the schedule release in general in the list-of-primetime-appearances count link below). But the question seemed to be moot, because the two best games of the week seemed to be in flexible featured windows – Tier 2 Chiefs-Broncos and Tier 1 Lions-Eagles – so there didn’t seem to be a need for flexing anyway.

I did warn that there was a decently high rate of divisional games that week that had rematches in primetime and couldn’t be flexed in, with Chiefs-Broncos, Bears-Vikings, and Bengals-Steelers specifically being noted as such in the graphic. But even at the time, Seahawks-Rams stung the most, because a high-profile game on the singleheader network is bad enough without it being in the late window. The NFL seems to prioritize high-profile games not being stuck on the late singleheader, once even “overriding” an existing protection on such a game to move it to primetime. Late singleheader games are limited in distribution to protect the main late doubleheader game, never crossing the 50% mark and rarely if ever even being the singleheader network’s highest-distributed game, though a late singleheader game getting the network’s A team does happen. The only real way to prevent a high-profile divisional matchup that can’t be flexed from being trapped on the late singleheader is for every West Coast game where the other half falls in primetime to fall in a doubleheader week for its respective network, and not only is that likely to be impractical, the networks and league probably don’t even want it if it dilutes the distribution for the main late game.

Of course, this raises the question of why this game was selected for primetime to begin with if the networks don’t believe in it, and whether we’re really missing out on the game of the year if these two teams will play again later in primetime – especially since I think the Rams are the better team (Seattle spent the last two weeks beating up on mediocre-at-best teams, whoop-de-do) so the rematch in Seattle should be more competitive than this game. The answer is that the rematch between these two teams is slated for Thursday Night Football, and TNF is still the primetime package with a greater diversity of teams featured (though not necessarily as much as MNF in the “doubleheader” era) at the expense of the quality of the game. It also means the rematch isn’t going to have that big an audience given the restriction of needing Prime Video to watch the game outside of the home markets of the teams playing.

Of course, the league, on paper, thinks enough of TNF and MNF to give them flex scheduling in the new contract, but as I mentioned a few weeks back I’m not entirely sure what that actually means for them, given the difficulties in flexing games to those nights. Week 11 was a big reason for that: I raised the question of the “iffy quality” of the games in those windows back in May and those worries played out to an even greater extent than was evident back then, with me spending several weeks commenting that Week 11 barely even felt like a flex scheduling week with the Thursday night game involving the woeful Jets and Monday night involving the forgettable Raiders. If you asked people what featured-window game they’d bump out for Seahawks-Rams, they might be forced to realize that Chiefs-Broncos and Lions-Eagles are still important marquee games in their own right. What makes the Seahawks-Rams situation so offensive is the offensive quality of the games on Thursday and Monday. The league may or may not see flex scheduling as meaning much to those windows, and they may or may not see them as worthy of putting decent games on for more than a handful of weeks a season, but maybe they should. Maybe the approach that treats those windows as a dumping ground should, at minimum, be throttled back around the middle of the season, a few weeks before the flex scheduling windows open for them. There are limits to how good their schedule can be top-to-bottom, but this is the part of the schedule where having bad games there hurts the most.

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.

Read more

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

by

On Wednesday’s First Take, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo ranted about the Cowboys’ surfeit of nationally televised games. Of the eight games the Cowboys have after the bye, six are slated for featured windows – and one of the other two is in Week 18, where nothing can be slated for featured windows ahead of time. Russo acknowledged “I know they’re gonna get ratings” but begged Joe Buck not to claim that the Cowboys “have a chance to make the playoffs” when he calls the Cowboys against the Raiders in two weeks, declaring “They! Are! Out! Of! It!”

A few hours later, ESPN underscored why the Cowboys are scheduled for so many nationally televised windows and are unlikely to be flexed out of all of them. This past Monday’s Cardinals-Cowboys game drew 16.2 million viewers, the second-highest total ESPN has drawn in Week 9 since 2011. Two sub-.500 teams drew an audience a million viewers over Monday Night Football‘s season average despite the Disney networks being blacked out on YouTube TV. To put that in perspective, Saturday’s big Oklahoma-Tennessee game had the lowest viewership of any program to be the most-watched opposite a World Series Game 7 in over 20 years, by over two million, despite only one such program in the intervening time being a live event of any kind and none of them being live sports. I have to imagine it would have done significantly better without the YouTube TV blackout, yet Cardinals-Cowboys managed to hold up to the tune of nearly four times the audience. (That said, it was the worst viewership mark of the season for a game that wasn’t part of a “doubleheader”, trailing two games that were part of “doubleheaders” and last week’s Washington-Chiefs game that went up against the World Series itself.)

This is why “Cowboys uber alles” exists: no matter how bad the Cowboys get, they can draw good enough ratings that networks would line up to get a package of just their games, and even if this year’s Cowboys might seem to “stink”, their offense is good enough that even games that might look like mismatches on paper have the potential to be entertaining. That doesn’t mean the Cowboys are completely immune to flexing – witness Cowboys-Browns a few years ago or, if you count late afternoon games, Cowboys-Eagles last year – but it seems like either both teams have to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, or the Cowboys could be eliminated but wouldn’t be if the game was played at an earlier time. None of that is likely to apply this year; the Cowboys’ Week 17 game is being played on Christmas and can’t be flexed, while their Week 16 game is their one remaining game before Week 18 that’s not scheduled for a featured window, and the prospect of it being flexed into primetime will affect what game does get flexed.

That leaves only two remaining Cowboys games in flexible featured windows, not counting Eagles-Cowboys on Fox Week 12, both with enough time left in the season that Cowboys fans could still have an outside chance of making the playoffs: Cowboys-Lions on the Thursday after Thanksgiving, and Vikings-Cowboys on Sunday night Week 15. I think Bears-Packers could potentially be swapped for Cowboys-Lions and keep the “full week’s rest for both teams” component of the week-after-Thanksgiving game, but even if that was under consideration Fox would probably protect it and swap it in for Bengals-Bills in its late doubleheader window instead. As for Vikings-Cowboys, the NFL wishes it was the worst of its problems that week because if it were, and if they were willing to flex it, they could simply swap in Colts-Seahawks; instead, as we’ve detailed in past weeks, they’re stuck looking at the even worse Dolphins in the Monday night window without a viable alternative to pivot to. Still, if the Cowboys are far enough out of it by then, that might be a situation worth paying attention to.

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.

Read more

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

by

Note: This post does not reflect the result of the Thursday night game, except in this opening section.

On Thursday Lamar Jackson made his triumphant return under center for the Ravens as they walloped the spiraling Dolphins 28-6, with the team picking up twice as many wins over the last five days as they had the entire season up to that point. It’s given them a good enough record that their games will qualify for being flex candidates on next week’s post, but it’s also weirdly unsurprising. Even when the Ravens were sitting at 1-5 and staring at what would ordinarily be daunting odds of making the playoffs, it was hard to write them off entirely. The Ravens faced a daunting first quarter of the season with three of their first four games coming against not only playoff teams but legitimate Super Bowl contenders, and right when their schedule looked like it might start getting easier, Jackson went down and the Ravens found themselves getting blown out by the mediocre Texans. The Bills’ struggles (getting outplayed by the Patriots at home and losing to the mediocre Falcons) have made it look like even the full-strength Ravens aren’t as good as we’re used to, but there was always reason to think that, when healthy, the Ravens were substantially better than 1-5 made them look.

And now that they’ve cleared that early season gauntlet, the path might be clear for them to make the playoffs. The Browns are still the Browns and the Bengals are going through yet another season from hell without Joe Burrow, leaving the Steelers as the only other respectable team in the division, and they haven’t been performing as well as you’d like either. The Ravens entered the week only two games back of the division lead with both Steelers games still to play, and their respective schedules go in very different directions. The Steelers have only one game against a team with a losing record that isn’t in their division the rest of the season, while the Ravens face only two teams with winning records that aren’t the Steelers: the Patriots Week 16 and the Packers Week 17.

Unfortunately, that means they won’t be much help for flex scheduling windows that otherwise find themselves lacking in options – especially since the second Steelers game is Week 18, which also means the first game in Week 14 probably can’t be flexed away from CBS in a week they have the singleheader (and where they already have another flex-immune potentially-division-deciding game in Colts-Jaguars). Ravens-Patriots falls in the one week that doesn’t need the help to provide flexing options, although if it comes down to that game or Jaguars-Broncos I think Ravens-Patriots would get the nod on name value all else being equal (although Jaguars-Broncos being a late singleheader game could counteract that).

But the broadcaster hoping the hardest to see a Ravens winning streak would be, of all things, Peacock. When the schedule was announced it looked like the league had made a big splash with its Saturday Week 17 games with multiple games pitting teams expected to have winning records coinciding with Peacock picking up the rights to one of the games, with the centerpiece being Ravens-Packers, a Tier 2 game that any of the networks would be proud to have in one of their regular marquee windows. Those games have almost all disappointed, and the only Saturday-eligible game pitting two teams at or above .500 at the moment is Seahawks-Panthers, a game that wasn’t expected to be particularly good. If the Ravens make a push for the playoffs, Peacock’s original vision of getting a game between marquee teams with playoff implications in primetime is back on the table, with Seahawks-Panthers or Texans-Chargers providing a more than suitable undercard game for NFL Network.

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.

Read more