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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 14

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Well, here we are. I warned the league back in May that the surfeit of divisional games CBS was getting in Week 15 that were rematches of games on other networks, none of which were even slated for the lead late game, could end up depriving viewers of marquee games while resulting in questionable games being played in primetime, and the situation is arguably worse than I thought with Colts-Seahawks playing second fiddle in the late window. Sunday’s results actually did a lot to mitigate the problem, with the Bengals’ loss all but eliminating them from the playoffs and the Chiefs’ loss giving them too much of a hill to climb, but Chargers-Chiefs is still going to steal a good chunk of Bills-Patriots’ thunder.

The first person I saw on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter to complain about this situation, a Buffalo-area sports radio host, made an interesting point about how it could have been avoided and why CBS might have been willing to relinquish control of one of their divisional games:

We know that the Sunday afternoon networks can decide to relinquish control over a game they have the right to keep under the division-rivalry rule, because Mike North said as much last year, and his argument was similar to the above: that the network would still have plenty of games with major implications without the game they’d be losing. But the specific scenario he laid out involved the Sunday afternoon network getting the Cowboys back, even though there was a worse game in another primetime window at the time those comments were made, which suggests the level of compensation the league would have to have given CBS to make it worth their while – namely, that it would likely have to have involved Vikings-Cowboys in the Sunday night window, not Dolphins-Steelers on Monday night. In both cases NBC would have screamed bloody murder at losing a Cowboys game even if the game they were getting back had more playoff implications, which gets to the real obstacle with this scenario: if a game is valuable to one network, it’s valuable to the other.

But how valuable is a game to a network, really, if it’s buried on the depth chart and overshadowed by other games? Even before the Bengals lost this week CBS had slated Ravens-Bengals to be called by Spero Dedes and the network’s fifth-tier broadcast team. Let ESPN have that game in place of Dolphins-Steelers and you not only free up distribution for Bills-Patriots and Chargers-Chiefs, but you get back a team with a substantial regional and national fanbase as well.

Ignore for the moment that such a trade would have actually have involved ESPN trading down to a worse game based on the records of the worse teams, and that CBS would have been much less likely to be willing to relinquish Bills-Patriots or Chargers-Chiefs this way. The real problem is that, as much as the networks want marquee games in their windows, every game has value to them even if they have regional distribution, at least as long as the fans in the teams’ home markets are interested in the game. Typically the late afternoon window draws the largest audience of any single window of the week (regardless of whether it’s showing a single full national game or not), but the early doubleheader and singleheader windows combine to draw a larger audience than even that.

As much as fantasy football, gambling, and just interest in the league as a whole drive interest in the best games, NFL fandom is still largely parochial and regional, with people being interested in their own teams first and foremost. There’s a reason “Cowboys uber alles” exists: networks would rather have a Cowboys game than a game involving any other team, even if the Cowboys game is only marginally relevant to the playoff picture. Increasing the distribution of CBS’ divisional games might be what’s best for the league, but for CBS it doesn’t outweigh the loss of the Ravens and Bengals audiences unless they’re getting bigger fanbases with similar interest in their teams’ playoff hopes back, and if that’s the case it’s probably not worth flexing out in the first place, or at least the network losing it probably doesn’t want to lose it. (Witness the incident in 2016 where both CBS and NBC would have preferred to air Pats-Jets over a clearly superior Chiefs-Broncos game before the Chiefs became near-Cowboys-level popular, resulting in a bewildering swap of the late doubleheader and Sunday night windows.) Yes, two years ago the league was able to give ESPN Texans-Colts in Week 18 when the first game between the teams was on Fox, and this year Cardinals-Seahawks was scheduled to have one matchup on CBS and the other on TNF, but Week 18 is always a weird exception to the rules and the latter case was decided before the season under the assumption that Cardinals-Seahawks would bring little value (even though it was a borderline Tier 6 matchup). In the middle of the season, when games’ value is established, it takes a lot of doing to make a swap worth a network’s while.

I made this same point two years ago, the last time there was a game buried in the early window glaring enough and attracting enough complaining for me to dedicate the opening section to explaining it, specifically to explain why CBS kept an inferior Bengals-Chiefs game in the late window over a Dolphins-Ravens game to determine the AFC’s 1 seed. That’s not a factor here; to hear some people talk Packers-Broncos is a potential Super Bowl preview. But earlier this year I wondered what flexible scheduling actually meant to Monday and Thursday Night Football considering the restrictions on them and some of the games that were scheduled for supposedly-flexible windows, and this same line of thinking has me thinking about the league’s scheduling philosophy more generally. Because the league talks a good game about “playing your way into primetime”, and more generally making sure there’s a good game in every window, yet this situation was so predictable that I have to wonder how much the league even cares about allowing people to watch big games.

I called out this week’s schedule before the season (see the primetime appearance counts link below) because I recognized that CBS had no fewer than three games that were rematches of games on other networks, all of them potentially marquee games and all of them in the early window – Chargers-Chiefs was a Tier 2 game while Ravens-Bengals was the one Tier 1 game not scheduled for a marquee window. (Meanwhile, Fox’s best early-window game was expected to be Cardinals-Texans, on the border between Tiers 5 and 6, and with the Cardinals not performing particularly well none of Fox’s early-window games pit two teams with records better than 3-10, so while CBS has a surfeit of marquee games, Fox can’t help but bring you a game expected to be either a blowout or just terrible on Sunday afternoon – their only game with a spread of less than a touchdown is Trumps-Giants.) The Patriots weren’t expected to be good enough to make any of my tiers, but the idea that they might be a playoff team with Mike Vrabel, a coach who’d been successful in the past with the Titans, coaching Drake Maye wasn’t entirely out of the question, even if no one could have predicted they’d be this good. At the very least, the fact that you considered Patriots-Bills good enough to put on Sunday night suggests that it should be good enough to put in a marquee window under other circumstances. It’s the same frustration I had with Seahawks-Rams: if it’s good enough for a featured window, it’s good enough to get better treatment on a Sunday afternoon than this.

To be sure, CBS and Fox are not obligated to put every divisional game that’s a rematch of a primetime game on in the late doubleheader window – leaving aside that that’s not always possible, they tend to prioritize marquee teams and big markets in the late afternoon window more than the primetime packages. I think CBS’ streak of putting Ravens-Bengals on at 1 PM and not 4:25 is disrespecting the appeal of two of the marquee quarterbacks in the league, though Burrow’s injury issues and the Bengals’ struggles to put together a good record in the first two-thirds of the season has muted its appeal in recent years from what it should be on paper. But the league should at least be able to minimize how many of those games are trapped on the late singleheader or air on the same network in the same window in the same week.

I don’t blame Fox or the NFL for not making Seahawks-Rams a lead late doubleheader game considering the name value and expected quality of the Seahawks, and while I’d have preferred if it had been scheduled for a doubleheader week so Fox could maximize its distribution if desired, I understand that that might not universally be possible. But in a general sense, any divisional matchups that are guaranteed to CBS and Fox because the other half is scheduled for a primetime window – not those scheduled for Week 18 or the other Sunday afternoon network, unless it’s the other network’s lead late game – need to be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the season, and if any week must have three such games, one of them has to be the lead late doubleheader game, rather than the lead late game being a non-divisional game that’s still Tier 2 or 3. (Preferably, this would be the case if there were just two such games, but that might be too common to be avoidable.) Two years ago I suggested the league should schedule all divisional games as evenly as possible, which I recognized even then was probably a bridge too far for them, but it really is these rematches of primetime games that represent the biggest unforced error the league potentially makes in constructing the schedule.

When I put together my mock schedules, the only rule I have regarding how divisional matchups are scheduled goes the other way: a game that’s the lead late game on CBS or Fox needs to have its return match on another network. That’s because the goal of my mock schedules is to maximize distribution of the games expected to be best and avoid situations where the league would want to pull a flex if the season played out exactly as expected, not to minimize potential heartache involving lower-tier or untiered games placed in primetime windows just to fill out the schedule; the rule that all Tier 1 games and West Coast Tier 2 games must be placed in featured windows, and that any game in the top three tiers must at minimum be named lead 1 PM games with no other competition of that level, would be sufficient to avoid this particular situation, and West Coast Tier 3 games that don’t make any featured windows are actually required to go in the late singleheader, it’s just that they have to go in loaded weeks where there isn’t room for them in the main featured windows, or at least where the singleheader network has a bigger game to justify the late window’s lower distribution.

This situation, though, has me wondering if I should expand the purpose of the mock schedule to identify weeks and windows for the return match of every divisional matchup I place in primetime to ensure an even distribution of those games and avoid situations like this week. (Note that I placed Bills-Patriots on TNF and Rams-Seahawks in Week 18 without identifying specific weeks for their return matches, meaning if the league had adopted my mock schedule both games would likely have played, or been expected to play, second fiddle in their respective weeks and Rams-Seahawks would likely have been trapped as a late singleheader or secondary late doubleheader game.) I count 17 such games on my mock schedule, just enough for one return match a week, though realistically I’d have to schedule two in some weeks, and it takes me long enough to put together the mock schedule as it is that I don’t know if I’d be able to fit this in on top of that. But it might be worth considering if I have time 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 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 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 10

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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.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 9

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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.

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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.

Read more