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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 13

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So far this season we haven’t had any “real” flexes, in the sense that none of the official flex-scheduling windows in primetime have seen any of their games flexed out. That will change as we enter the home stretch of the season, and for a season that hasn’t had any flexing so far, it’s hard to think of a season seeing so much December flex drama.

The storyline of this season is that no one seems to look particularly good; each week the league’s pundits look for a team to anoint as the best of the league, only for that team to take an upset loss against a team with no business beating them, most recently the Rams falling to a Panthers team that has alternated wins over good teams with losses to the likes of the lowly Saints. The Rams still look like the team that would “make the most sense” winning the Super Bowl, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a result of no one wanting to believe that the best team in the league has Sam Darnold or a second-year player at quarterback. The Packers looked like the Super Bowl favorites in the first third of the season, only to take losses to the likes of the Browns, the aforementioned Panthers (at home this time, as opposed to the Rams losing on the road), and the Eagles right as they seemingly forgot how to play offense – and now people are talking about them as Super Bowl contenders again, if only because they can’t figure out who else to put in the 5 spot of their power rankings.

For flex scheduling purposes, what this means is that there’s rarely a reason to give up on a tentative game. To be sure, this past Monday’s Giants-Patriots game was absolutely deserving of a flex and likely would have been if it were a Sunday game, but most other games on the slate involve teams with at least outside shots at the playoffs. Things are only getting more dramatic as the season comes down to the wire; no fewer than three teams, the Cowboys, Bengals, and Dolphins, that spent the entire season to this point nowhere near the playoff picture are now hoping to make late charges to sneak into the playoffs, while the mighty Chiefs, after making it at least to overtime of the AFC Championship Game every year of Patrick Mahomes’ career, might have to act like those teams just to make the playoffs. 23 teams have realistic shots at claiming one of the 14 playoff spots, meaning just about every game has playoff implications.

I’ve complained in the past about the league being careless with scheduling divisional games that are locked to their respective conference’s network in the main flex period, and I’m going to do it again next week with a bounty of big divisional games on Sunday afternoon and Dolphins-Steelers lucking into not being a disaster thanks to the Dolphins’ late push. But in a broader sense, there are so many divisional games in December – this week also has a bunch of divisional games locked into regional distribution, most glaringly Colts-Jaguars – that it greatly complicates figuring out what things might look like down the stretch, what games might be important and how, especially in Week 18. There’s a lot of variation as it is in trying to figure out what Week 18 might look like too many weeks out, but the variation seems especially wide this year. Of the three games that, in my view, look likeliest to be division title games, two haven’t played their first matchup yet and the third only played its first matchup this week. There’s a lot of variation in possible outcomes for a lot of teams, especially when it comes to who might win the AFC North and South and NFC West (and to a lesser extent NFC North), all divisions with three teams with a realistic shot to win them. The next two to three weeks will make a big difference on what the playoff picture looks like, and with it, what the Week 18 schedule might look like.

With regards to the next two weeks, the team that will make the most impact on flex scheduling is the Jacksonville Jaguars, who could see games flexed into primetime in consecutive weeks. Traditionally, the Jags are such ratings poison that in the last year of the SNF-only flex scheduling regime, when Titans-Jaguars was a division title game, the league passed on it for the SNF finale in favor of a Packers-Lions game where the Lions would be eliminated before game time, lucking into the Lions playing hard and beating the Packers anyway. But that year the AFC South struggled to get to .500 and seemed destined to be swept out of the playoffs by a superior wild card team only for the Jags to mount a historic comeback to knock out the Chargers.

This time around, few teams exemplify this season of inconsistency and flawed teams from top to bottom like the Jags: a marquee Monday night win over the Chiefs, not to mention wins over the Texans, Niners, and Chargers, but also a nasty loss to the Bengals where Joe Burrow got hurt and the Bengals came back to win after the injury when Jake Browning came in, and the only games they’ve played against teams we’re sure are good were a home loss to the Seahawks and a blowout loss in their second home of London to the Rams. Now they’re sitting in the 3 seed with a pair of matchups with the Colts looming on top of one more big showdown against the current 2 seed, one that has the biggest point in its favor for a potential flex: the prospect of being locked into the late singleheader. These are the games that will prove whether the Jags are for real, a real threat to make a deep run in the playoffs, and in the case of the first Colts game, whether they can “play their way into primetime” twice over – and at least one Jags fan is already calling his shot when it comes to the flexing stakes of this week’s Colts game.

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

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 12

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I’ve complained in the past about how much I often tend to struggle with filling out this opening section. That hasn’t been quite so much the case this year, but in some ways it’s grown more acute. The 506sports Discord locked itself behind Patreon at the start of the season, meaning I don’t have an antidote to the insanity of my comment section (or at least of one particular commenter), and I don’t have as much exposure to any developments or reporting that might have bearing on flex scheduling. (Though some quick Googling suggests that Mike North hasn’t done any in-season interviews of the sort he’s done the last few years.)

Here’s an example of something that might fill out this section but which would mostly be repeated in the weekly capsules: in the second installment of this year’s iteration of this feature, I noted the Dolphins’ woeful start and how it would, or wouldn’t, affect flex scheduling this year. Since then they’ve gone 3-1, with the only loss coming in Lamar Jackson’s comeback followed up by a big home win over the Bills (Miami’s first win over the Bills in three years and second in seven), and ascended to the level of mere mediocrity rather than outright disaster. Will that save their primetime appearances?

We’ll see. Part of the point of my bringing them up in Week 7 was that it was virtually impossible to flex them out of their Monday night game against the Steelers given the limited number of games capable of making that move and the questionable quality of the teams in those games, meaning that game was likely to keep its spot no matter what. More interesting would be their Sunday night tilt against the Bengals, which depends as much on what the Bengals do with Joe Burrow back as on the Dolphins. With games against the woeful Saints and Jets the next two weeks, there’s a very good chance the Dolphins will end up at 6-7 by the time the decision needs to be made (assuming the league can’t wait for the Monday night result when making a decision with six days’ notice), which I hear gets the kids all excited. Would that be enough to avoid a flex when the Bengals are already guaranteed to be worse than that?

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

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

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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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

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What does flexible scheduling mean for Monday and Thursday Night Football, particularly when it comes to how the league sees them?

Historically, ESPN’s package was considered the secondary primetime package getting games of somewhat questionable quality, while Thursday nights were a tertiary package hobbled by the need to show every team exactly once to balance out everyone’s short weeks. The NFL has attempted to improve the quality of the games both packages have gotten over the last decade; during the “broadcast-network-and-NFLN-simulcast” era for TNF (during a time when the league’s relationship with ESPN was… not great) it regularly rated ahead of MNF in simulcast weeks and the league treated it accordingly, giving it games as good as the restrictions on the package allowed for, and since Jimmy Pitaro has taken the helm at ESPN and started simulcasting MNF games on ABC, and especially since the new TV deal that gives ABC and ESPN Super Bowls, the league has started giving them better games as well, including last year’s Super Bowl rematch between the Niners and Chiefs. This year ESPN got two Tier 1 games, Lions-Ravens and Washington-Chiefs, the latter of which was also identified as one of the most coveted games for TV partners by the posters on the 506sports Discord. But NBC, CBS, and Fox each got at least three Tier 1 games and at least three coveted games, and Amazon didn’t get any game in either category.

Part of what holds Monday and Thursday nights back is how many games of each team they’re able to air. Since the start of the new TV deals, no team has been scheduled for more than two games on either package at the start of the year, and we know no team can play more than two in the case of Thursday nights. NBC, by contrast, regularly has teams scheduled for as many as three games at the start of the year, and even before the expansion of the season could have teams flexed in for a fourth. ESPN is further constricted by their “doubleheaders” giving them more games than the other primetime package and requiring them to show games involving more teams, making them the package of last resort for teams with only one primetime appearance, not TNF like it used to be. This all has the effect of limiting how many good games each package can air and increasing the chance that each package will show games involving teams of questionable quality, even if the days of the Jags and Titans squaring off in the Tank Bowl on TNF are in the past. And while both packages are getting better games, and more good games, than they used to, they’re still mixed in with a number of games that wouldn’t be caught dead on SNF or as the lead late doubleheader game.

So what are the league’s expectations for those packages in light of the expansion of flex scheduling to them? Flexible scheduling brings with it the expectation that there’s a level of quality the league doesn’t want the packages to fall below, but that’s not necessarily the level that the league schedules them for. Both packages have had games scheduled for flexible windows that seemed to be of questionable quality when the schedule came out, though ESPN more so than Amazon; both last year and this year, the Monday after Thanksgiving got its week tagged as a “yellow light” week as a week where the league might pull the flex if every team involved played exactly as expected, and last year each package also contributed to identifying a “red light” week where the league would want to pull a flex but couldn’t because of the additional protections CBS and Fox got in the new TV deals. So far, no SNF game has been expected to be the worst flexible game in a week I tagged as “yellow light” or “red light”. So is the league okay with continuing to schedule questionable games for Monday and Thursday nights despite the expansion of flex scheduling to them? But what to make of those “yellow light” weeks where, based on the expectations surrounding the teams when the schedule comes out, the league would already be expected to flex out of their own game?

Worth noting that last year’s “yellow light” game ended up not being flexed out (much to my surprise), and this year’s game seems unlikely to be flexed out either. In both cases, the reason may have to do with how changing the date a game is played affects the amount of rest teams get, which may be the main factor preventing flexible scheduling from raising the level of Monday and Thursday nights too much, besides the restrictions on the number of times teams can play on each night. Teams obviously can’t play Thursday night games immediately following Monday night games (Sunday-to-Thursday jumps are bad enough), and teams playing on Monday or Thursday nights in consecutive weeks are probably something the league wants to avoid in general because of the rest mismatches they create. Even Monday night games after Thursday games might be a bridge too far for the league, exacerbating the rest mismatch that already exists the week after a Thursday game.

All of this may be coming to a head when it comes to the Miami Dolphins, starting the season 1-6 and in an absolute tailspin with people wondering why head coach Mike McDaniel hasn’t been fired yet. The Dolphins are scheduled for a Week 15 Monday night clash with Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, in a week where I was already worried about the number of marquee games unable to be flexed due to being divisional matchups with rematches on the wrong network. But if the game were the Sunday nighter, as will be the case for the Dolphins the following week, it could be flexed out no problem, with the Colts successfully “playing their way into primetime”. On Monday night, the game not only has to deal with not shortening anyone’s rest for the following week’s Thursday game, but the two games Fox has scheduled for the following Saturday. That means ESPN’s options for replacing it are very limited, and it’s not clear that the options they do have are any better.

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

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 21 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road without the team’s permission.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

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

It’s time for another year of the Flex Schedule Watch, and as I alluded to in May I’m rolling out new HTML tables for the weekly display of games, even though two of the reasons I cited back then didn’t pan out. WordPress technically has a dedicated block for tables, but it also hijacks a lot of the HTML behind them, replaces some functions with its own custom code, and rejects some perfectly valid HTML if it doesn’t do things the way it wants to, which wouldn’t be quite so bad if the formatting options below the level of the entire table weren’t so limited. On its own, that would be enough to lead me to use a “custom HTML” block for the tables. The resulting table is narrow enough that I decided I wanted to have the body text wrap around it, and to avoid running into the same problem that frustrated me with the old graphics I ended up resorting to exploiting code WordPress normally only uses to support the classic editor. That could have allowed me to keep the table without resorting to the classic editor for the rest of the post, but the table is also wide enough that the text can’t squeeze in between the tables, and WordPress hijacks the HTML that would normally force the body text below any tables on the same side and I don’t know if it even has its own way of doing that, so classic editor it is.

Still, the point about screen readers remains valid, and this format allows me to include more and more descriptive notes, which is important when considering how complex and overlapping all the different factors I wanted to cover there were becoming – see the places where I noted Thursday or Monday night games in preceding or following weeks on the May post. (The main factor that convinced me to stick with this format and not go back to the previous format was just how difficult it was going to be to keep track of everything in Weeks 15 and 16 in particular. If I do ditch this format, I may still change how the weekly graphics look compared to last year.) Beyond that, I want to see how hard or easy, or fun, this will be to maintain compared to the previous system. Getting the graphics from the last couple of years to look the way I want in Excel was harder than it looked, because of a confluence of factors involving how Excel supports pictures and other visual elements that aren’t part of the cells themselves, as well as how varying border widths affects the whole spreadsheet. (Last year’s Week 15 graphics, which started with three rows of flexible windows instead of two, had to be worked on on an entirely separate set of rows from the rest of the graphics.)

This does mean I’ll have to update the team records and equivalent of the Buzzmeter manually, though, which could result in this approach taking longer than the previous system, but I could still end up deciding it’s worth it if I enjoy it more than wrestling with Excel, especially since I did something similar before with the Playoff Pictures – although it might not be a good sign that I’m probably still going to use static images for those. (Also, I’ve seriously been considering not ordering the flex candidates by quality and instead ordering them according to the order they’re in on the NFL web site, freeing me from having to copy-and-paste rows manually.) Ultimately, I consider this an experiment in whether this approach will work going forward, though I’m already not optimistic. Still, I went to all the trouble to put together new team-logo graphics and even graphics for each individual featured window, so I might as well get some use out of them.

Speaking of the Buzzmeter, because of the limitations of HTML – as, to my knowledge, I can’t crop an image with HTML alone – what I’ve done is color the background of the notes section from red to yellow to green based on the record of the worse team in each game. I was going to put a colored circle between the teams but it wasn’t big enough for the color to stand out. I’m still not completely happy with this, though, and I might end up deciding to add a blank column, either between the teams, on the far left side, or between the timeslot/broadcaster logo and the team logos. I welcome any input you might have as to what might work best.

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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