Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 12

Since it started in its current format as the NFL’s main primetime package in 2006, the defining feature of NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been the use of flexible scheduling to ensure the best matchups and showcase the best teams as the season goes along. Well, that’s the theory, anyway; the reality has not always lived up to the initial hype and has at times seemed downright mystifying. Regardless, I’m here to help you figure out what you can and can’t expect to see on Sunday nights on NBC.

A full explanation of all the factors that go into flexible scheduling decisions can be found on my NFL Flexible Scheduling Primer, but here’s the Cliffs Notes version with all the important points you need to know:

• The season can be broken down into three different periods (four if you count the first four weeks where flexible scheduling does not apply at all) for flexible scheduling purposes, each with similar yet different rules governing them: the early flex period, from weeks 5 to 10; the main flex period, from weeks 11 to 17; and week 18. In years where Christmas forces either the Sunday afternoon slate or the Sunday night game to Saturday in Week 16, flex scheduling does not apply that week, and the main flex period begins week 10.
• In all cases, only games scheduled for Sunday may be moved to Sunday night. Thursday and Monday night games are not affected by Sunday night flexible scheduling (discounting the “flexible scheduling” applied to Saturdays in December in recent years – see below).
• During the early and main flex periods, one game is “tentatively” scheduled for Sunday night and listed with the Sunday night start time of 8:20 PM ET. This game will usually remain at that start time and air on NBC, but may be flexed out for another game and moved to 1, 4:05, or 4:25 PM ET on Fox or CBS, no less than 12 days in advance of the game.
• No more than two games can be flexed to Sunday night over the course of the early flex period. If the NFL wishes to flex out a game in the early flex period twelve days in advance, CBS and Fox may elect to protect one game each from being moved to Sunday night. This is generally an emergency valve in situations where the value of the tentative game has plummeted since the schedule was announced, namely in cases of injury to a key star player.
• CBS and Fox may also each protect games, historically in five out of six weeks of the main flex period (whether or not they received an additional protection with the expansion of the main flex period an additional week is unknown), but all of those protections must be submitted after week 5, week 4 in years where the main flex period begins week 10 (so it is always six weeks before the start of the main flex period).
• No team may appear more than six times across the league’s three primetime packages on NBC, ESPN, and Fox/NFL Network, and only three teams are allowed to appear that often, with everyone else getting five. In addition, no team may appear more than four times on NBC. All teams’ number of appearances heading into this season may be seen here.
• According to the league’s official page, teams are notified when “they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.” However, they rarely make this known to the fans, and the list of each network’s protections has never officially been made public. It used to leak fairly regularly, but has not leaked since 2014.
• In all cases, the NFL is the ultimate arbiter of the schedule and consults with CBS, Fox, and NBC before moving any games to prime time. If the NFL does elect to flex out the Sunday night game, the network whose game is flexed in may receive the former tentative game, regardless of which network would “normally” air it under the “CBS=AFC, Fox=NFC” rules, keeping each network’s total number of games constant. At the same time, the NFL may also move games between 1 PM ET and 4:05/4:25 PM ET. However, this feature focuses primarily if not entirely on Sunday night flexible scheduling.
• In Week 18, the entire schedule is set on only six days notice, ensuring that NBC gets a game with playoff implications, generally a game where the winner is the division champion. More rarely, NBC may also show an intra-division game for a wild card spot, or a game where only one team wins the division with a win but doesn’t win the division with a loss, but such situations are rare and 2018 and 2020, respectively, were the first times it showed such games. If no game is guaranteed to have maximum playoff implications before Sunday night in this fashion, the league has been known not to schedule a Sunday night game at all. To ensure maximum flexibility, no protections or appearance limits apply to Week 17. The NFL also arranges the rest of the schedule such that no team playing at 4:25 PM ET (there are no 4:05 games Week 17) could have their playoff fate decided by the outcome of the 1 PM ET games, which usually means most if not all of the games with playoff implications outside Sunday night are played at 4:25 PM ET. However, beginning this season, the NFL will also move two games to Saturday to be simulcast on ESPN and ABC.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Week 11 (November 21):

• Selected game: Pittsburgh @ LA Chargers.

Week 12 (November 28):

• Selected game: Cleveland @ Baltimore.

Week 13 (December 5):

• Selected game: Denver @ Kansas City.

Week 14 (December 12):

• Selected game: Chicago @ Green Bay. I predicted Niners-Bengals would be flexed in, but I’m not as surprised by this as I was last week as I could have very easily picked this game to keep its spot. What does surprise me is that the league moved Niners-Bengals into the late afternoon window even though there’s no reason to back off of Bills-Bucs as CBS’ main late game, but as I mentioned in the Last-Minute Remarks post CBS had an embarrassment of riches in the early window so it’s not clear the distribution would be too much worse.

Week 15 (December 19):

• Tentative game: New Orleans @ Tampa Bay
• Prospects: 5-6 v. 8-3 with the Saints now not only out of the playoffs but tied for second in the division with the Falcons, and the prospect of the Bucs pulling away with the division. But the Saints are actually only out of the playoffs on tiebreakers; it seems like any NFC team wouldn’t have much reason to be flexed out at the moment, except the Lions and maybe Seahawks.
• Likely protections: Bengals-Broncos if anything (CBS) and Packers-Ravens or Seahawks-Rams (FOX).
• Other possible games: As usual, assuming the games set aside for a potential move to Saturday can’t be protected. If Packers-Ravens is protected, Bengals-Broncos is the best game on the slate followed by Titans-Steelers, with Falcons-Niners also lurking about. Incredibly, RedHogs-Eagles, originally a game reserved for a potential move to Saturday that never really seemed like it was seriously in the running, may now be as much of a candidate for a Sunday night move as Panthers-Bills, which was more competitive for a Saturday move.
• Analysis: The NFL announced Packers-Ravens would be moved to the late window to become Fox’s new feature game, so I’m going to assume if it wasn’t protected it either is now or effectively is. Frankly even if it wasn’t protected Saints-Bucs might well become the new feature game making a flex pointless. If Bengals-Broncos was protected the best option in terms of records is a game where the better team is a half-game worse than the tentative and the worse team is a half-game better, which makes it less lopsided but not very compelling. Would a game that’s 5-7 v. 8-4 or 9-3 be flexed out for a game that’s 6-4 v. 6-5-1, particularly when one of the teams involved in the potential replacement doesn’t have much name value? Probably not. 8-4 v. 7-5 would be more difficult to ignore, but it still feels like Tom Brady has more name value in his little finger than the Bengals and Broncos have on their entire teams, Joe Burrow aside. If 6-5 v. 7-4 couldn’t unseat 4-7 v. 9-3, I have a hard time seeing a flex here; the Saints aren’t nearly as compelling without Drew Brees, but the Broncos also don’t have anywhere near the market or star power of the Niners, and even if it seems like the Saints are in complete freefall without Jameis Winston, they’ll be at worst a game out of the playoffs when the decision is made. If the Bucs beat the Falcons there’s a chance they’ll have the division sewn up by the time the game is played, so the league might end up having to think long and hard about a flex, but they’ll still have to fight for seeding and even in the worst-case scenario the Saints should have at least an outside shot at a playoff spot, and the alternatives just aren’t compelling enough for me to go with them.
• Final prediction: New Orleans Saints @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers (no change).

Week 16 (December 26):

• Tentative game: Washington @ Dallas
• Prospects: 5-6 v. 7-4. The Cowboys have escaped last season’s NFC East mediocrity, while Washington is now second place in the division and in position to potentially receive a wild card, only two games behind the Cowboys. The only way this likely gets flexed out is if the Cowboys could have the division on lockdown and have their seed locked in, and since this is now the third-to-last week of the season, that’s not likely.
• Likely protections: Ravens-Bengals, Bills-Patriots, Steelers-Chiefs, Broncos-Raiders, or nothing (CBS) and Bucs-Panthers, Bears-Seahawks, or nothing (FOX).
• Other possible games: I listed four protection options for CBS this week and somehow all four currently pit two teams at or above .500, with Rams-Vikings not too far behind. Bucs-Panthers is a dark horse.

Week 17 (January 2):

• Tentative game: Minnesota @ Green Bay
• Prospects: 5-6 v. 9-3. The Vikings are still only out of the playoffs on tiebreakers, but the matchup is now another game more lopsided, and given the quality of the alternatives it might be difficult for this game to defend its spot. If the Packers don’t have anything to play for (though they’re still in a fight for the first-round bye) this still might be a cinch to be flexed out.
• Likely protections: Chiefs-Bengals or Broncos-Chargers (CBS) and Rams-Ravens or Cardinals-Cowboys (FOX).
• Other possible games: Chiefs-Bengals and Fox’s potentially protected games all involve only teams at 7-4 or better, which is probably the point where you can start thinking about overcoming the tentative game bias. Broncos-Chargers and Raiders-Colts are lagging behind, with Falcons-Bills saved by the NFC’s mediocrity, and Panthers-Saints and Eagles-Presidents as dark horses.

Week 18 (January 9):

• Tentative game: None (NBC will show game with guaranteed playoff implications).
• Games to watch: Pretty much every NFC game except Packers-Lions lol; even Seahawks-Cardinals could come into play if the Niners and Rams are keeping it close enough for the division. On the AFC side, only the AFC South games are truly out of the running at the moment; the North and West are tightly packed and the East games could see whichever team is in wild card position facing a “win and in, lose and the winner of another game knocks you out” scenario.