Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.
I decided to wait and see what the Vikings did at the trade deadline before I began writing this post, to inform what I say in the Week 11 section (and as it happens, Kirk Cousins’ injury has an impact on several other weeks as well), but in retrospect I should have at least written this opening section as soon as I came up with it because now I’m struggling to remember what I was going to say here. I know I was going to say something about how there were some more upsets this past week but perhaps the ones that most stood out to me were a pair of teams going in opposite directions, one of which was the Broncos. After beating up on the Chiefs without Taylor Swift (and how weird it is to think that that’s as notable an absence as any player), the Broncos have now won two straight and might be, possibly, climbing up to respectability, with the Broncos defense showing up in a way they never did against the Dolphins and Russell Wilson having a respectable, even good, day.
Then again, the other team they’ve beaten in the past two weeks was the Green Bay Packers, which have now lost four straight after a 2-1 start, including a loss to a Raiders team that just fired their coach. I’m not certain the Packers were the other team I was going to mention, but they do have a couple of games in featured windows that are now looking very vulnerable.
How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)
- Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
- Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
- Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
- CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
- Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
- No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night 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.
- 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.
Week 11: You’d think the Broncos’ newfound success would be good news for their Week 11 clash with the Vikings keeping its spot, especially as the Vikings have been on their own tear back to respectability in recent weeks… until Kirk Cousins’ renaissance season came to a crashing halt. Now the Vikings have traded for Josh Dobbs, whose old team benched him without even knowing for sure who they were benching him for, and who will now be starting the mighty Jaren Hall. The Vikings have gone 3-0 including knocking off the 49ers since losing Justin Jefferson against the Chiefs, raising the prospect of the Ewing Theory kicking in for Cousins as well, but it’s a rocky proposition.
Regardless, there isn’t really much in the way of better options. Fox reportedly protecting Niners-Jaguars for Week 10 lends credence to the notion that the one-end-of-each-divisional-matchup rule allows networks to refrain from protecting games when the other half is airing on another network (and the fact they needed to file a protection at all may make me reconsider what happened with Bears-Chargers Week 8), so in all likelihood the only games available to flex in involve teams with the exact same 3-5 record as the Broncos, at best. Titans-Jaguars could be an option, but even if the Titans had knocked off the Steelers, if NBC didn’t want Titans-Jaguars when it was a division title game last year do they really want it in the middle of the regular season with a 4-4 Titans squad? That’s especially the case since the Broncos are on bye this week, meaning their record can’t get any worse and the best Titans-Jags could have hoped for was for the Titans to be one full game better than the Broncos. Final prediction: No changes.
Week 12: The first Monday Night Football game ever to be eligible to be flexed out may well be flexed out, but this is the week where in years past I’d be saying “Thanksgiving week, paucity of good games”, and sure enough the options don’t exactly look encouraging. The Steelers and Bengals are starting to look respectable, but the other game between them is scheduled to be on NBC, and once you look past games like that the best option becomes a game involving a Raiders team that just fired their coach, and a game in Bucs-Colts that pits two teams below .500. Unless one of those teams starts performing drastically better in the next two weeks, you’re going to have to put up with the Bears in primetime again.
Week 13: The Packers’ losing streak is opening the door for their game against the Chiefs to be flexed out, and all the games shown here are Fox games that aren’t divisional games (I have CBS protecting Broncos-Texans but Colts-Titans or Chargers-Patriots are also possible). So there’s a very real chance for Chiefs-Packers to be flexed out for Lions-Saints or Falcons-Jets. The question, though, is whether either of those games will pop a bigger rating than Chiefs-Packers, especially if Swift makes the trek up to Lambeau Field.
Week 14: This is the last week before the deadline for flexing out Pats-Steelers, and I’m inclined to think it’s likely to keep its spot. Texans-Jets is the best option available right now, and it likely requires the Texans to beat the Bucs and the Patriots to lose to Washington; even then it’d be a massive drop in name value and wouldn’t involve an Aaron Rodgers comeback, and the league might want to keep Texans-Jets on standby as the one game that can be flexed in for Packers-Giants on Monday night. Still, my instinct is that Packers-Giants has more value on its own than Pats-Steelers, and flexing Texans-Jets to Thursday opens the door to replacing Packers-Giants with any game the league wants. If the league wants to get a test of TNF flexing out of the way this might be their best shot, though the next couple weeks involve games that aren’t that great either. (Who’d have thought the Jets might be being flexed into Thursday night when Rodgers went down?)
Week 15: If it weren’t for Cousins’ injury Vikings-Bengals might be lining up to give NFL Network an actually respectable game on its Saturday slate. Even if the Vikings go into the tank, though, they’d need the Bears to catch them to fall out of contention for a Saturday game – or maybe for the Browns to be closer to playoff contention than the Bengals, but that seems unlikely. Meanwhile Eagles-Seahawks continues to be favored to replace Chiefs-Patriots on Monday night. (I only now, as I was writing this, noticed that the Raiders’ record hadn’t been updating the last two weeks and fixed that on my spreadsheet, but given the options available a Thursday flex seems distinctly unlikely.)
Week 16: In the past I’d have skipped this week with NBC abandoning Christmas Eve night to NFL Network and playing non-flexible games on Saturday instead, but by all appearances TNF flexing is in place even if shorter-distance flexes aren’t. Saints-Rams isn’t a great game, but at the moment it’s not worth it to flex out a game involving a 3-5 team for one involving a 3-4 team, as the best-case scenario would likely be right now. Lions-Vikings would be a bit more compelling if the league would look past the return match coming in Week 18, but the fact that there’s only a two-game margin between them would likely ward them off of it since it would mean there’s a distinct possibility of a division title game, to say nothing of the possibility of the Vikings going into the tank without Cousins.
Week 17: The Packers’ struggles and the loss of Cousins, taken together, make Packers-Vikings a very good candidate to be flexed out. Dolphins-Ravens is a good game that’s likely to be unprotected, but the question is whether that would leave CBS with too weak of an early window with Raiders-Colts and Patriots-Bills. You could also see Fox leave Steelers-Seahawks unprotected in favor of Niners-Commies or Saints-Bucs, since it’ll be pinned to the late singleheader with limited distribution. Speaking of Saints-Bucs, if the NFC South is shaping up to be the tire fire the North isn’t, that game could have significant playoff implications if that outweighs the ease of setting the Week 18 schedule. If the Jets and/or Browns go into the tank, the Thursday and Sunday night deadlines being three weeks apart could leave the league, and Fox, in an odd position, especially since Saints-Bucs might not realistically be movable to Thursday since its eligibility depends on being able to give the Saints a full week off when the Bucs wouldn’t.
Playoff picture charts and Week 18 coverage begin Week 9.