I ended up putting out the Week 11 Flex Schedule Watch post about halfway through Sunday’s early games, so if you haven’t read it, do. I have a lot of thoughts about Mike North’s comments on various platforms over the weekend, including his insistence that flex scheduling is there to ensure games with playoff implications in every window, seemingly to the point that one of the worst teams in the NFL would keep its spot if the team they’re playing is in the thick of the playoff hunt. What we’ll be paying attention to over the last month-plus of the season is how much that actually reflects the league’s approach. In the meantime, this post covers both the Monday night flex scheduling situation for Week 14 and the Thursday night flex scheduling situation for Week 17.
Week 14: North also indicated that he and his team had been strongly considering flexing out Packers-Giants for Texans-Jets, which surprised me as I figured the Packers and Giants had enough name value, and the Texans were lacking enough in it, that it would take some pretty overwhelming circumstances to pull the trigger. However, North also said that last week’s Packers and Giants wins had made such a flex less likely, and this week’s results, with the Packers and Giants winning again and the Texans and Jets losing, pretty much amounted to the perfect storm to allow Packers-Giants to keep its spot. The Giants are now only a half-game worse than the Jets, but the Jets increasingly look like the bigger tire fire and the possibility of Aaron Rodgers coming back isn’t enough to overcome that; meanwhile, the Texans are only a game better than the Packers with both being within striking distance of the playoffs. I don’t think those circumstances warrant a flex.
North didn’t talk about the possibility of the other half of the Monday night “doubleheader”, Titans-Dolphins, being flexed out, even though all the non-Texans-Jets games on the slate would be available for it. But while the league has used flex scheduling to put the same team on in the same primetime window in consecutive weeks, they haven’t done it in a while and I think they’d be really hesitant to do so for Monday night. Bengals-Jaguars is the Week 13 Monday night game, so flexing in Jags-Browns or Colts-Bengals would give one of those teams consecutive Monday night games; meanwhile, because Niners-Seahawks aired on NBC on Thanksgiving, Seahawks-Niners is locked to Fox without them even having to protect it. Under the assumption that protections had to be submitted before the deadline for the Thursday night flex, I predicted Fox would protect Rams-Ravens, and I might still lean towards that even though Vikings-Raiders is less lopsided since it’s pinned to the late singleheader with limited distribution. Either way, though, the best-case scenario is a game involving a team only a game better than the Titans, and I think showcasing Tua Tagovailoa, and even Will Levis, outweighs the possibility of going with a less lopsided game. Final prediction: No changes. (This also applies to the Sunday night and late Sunday afternoon windows after next week; color me skeptical that CBS would want to make Jags-Browns its new lead game over Bills-Chiefs under any circumstances, even before getting into this being the Bills’ bye week so they can’t fall below .500.)
Week 17: The reason I thought protections were due when the Thursday night flex was was because I wasn’t sure how protections would interact with the Thursday night flex in that instance; would networks be allowed to change their protection from the Thursday deadline to the Monday or Sunday deadline? Would networks be forced to lock in their protections several weeks early by the league voicing support for a potential TNF flex? Or would the league operate without any games being protected at all and work with the networks to avoid taking away any games they might otherwise want to protect?
These questions are relevant to this week where Amazon might find itself stuck showcasing the Jets’ tire fire and where whatever game Fox decided to protect would weigh heavily on the decision. I don’t really have a good sense of what Fox might protect; Steelers-Seahawks is probably the best game on the slate in terms of both records and name value, but is pinned to the late singleheader with limited distribution, and even with Saints-Bucs having NFC South implications I’m not sure how much Fox would want to hold on to it. If protections were due right now I think Fox would go with a game involving the Giants or Washington.
I’ve identified three TNF-eligible games but I don’t think Saints-Bucs would be a good choice as it depends on the Saints having played TNF the previous week, meaning they’d have had a full week of rest but the Bucs wouldn’t, which I don’t think the league would want to inflict on them. Chargers-Broncos and Steelers-Seahawks, in my reckoning, are eligible because of the Chargers and Steelers playing the previous Saturday, although North’s comments about the two-TNF-game-limit spinning out of the idea of the Black Friday game would seem to suggest the extra day of rest isn’t enough to keep it from falling under TNF game limits; even allowing teams to be flexed into a second Thursday road game wouldn’t be much help because of the Christmas day tripleheader the previous Monday.
If Steelers-Seahawks is protected that would leave a game involving a Chargers team with the same record as the Jets; if not, it’s worth noting that the Packers’ winning streak is making it less likely that the Sunday night game gets flexed out, where Steelers-Seahawks might otherwise seem to be a prime candidate. The Packers do host the Chiefs next week but then the Vikings are their only other opponent the rest of the way with a winning record, the Packers and Vikings do have enough name value that having it keep its spot just might be justifiable even if the Packers implode to 5-10, and even if not Saints-Bucs, despite involving two teams below .500, just might have enough playoff implications in the race for the NFC South to be worth flexing in. (Note that the Bucs, who would have to beat the Packers for them to go on a four-game skid, play the Panthers in Week 18, which would probably not be ideal for a Sunday night or Saturday window even if the first half of the matchup weren’t airing on CBS this coming week, while each Bucs win makes it less likely that Falcons-Saints decides the division.)
I’m almost talking myself into flexing in Steelers-Seahawks for Jets-Browns, which would allow the league to get its test of the Thursday night flex out of the way. But there are a few things holding me back. For one, all the caveats about the possibility of Packers-Vikings holding up is too couched in the language of probability for the league to rely on it. For another, if it looks seriously likely that the league would flex in Steelers-Seahawks, Fox might well decide to protect it. It would also look weird to flex out a game with clear playoff implications for one team (and possibly both) barely a week after all of North’s comments about only flexing out games that don’t have playoff implications, though the way he talked about flexing out Chiefs-Patriots as a possibility makes it seem like that should be an option here too. More importantly, it would be weird to give the Steelers a game on four days rest on top of the two Thursday games they’re already scheduled for barely a week after North implied that the Black Friday game, played on four days rest, is subject to the TNF appearance limit. And all of that’s not even getting into the possibility of Aaron Rodgers playing in this game. I wouldn’t be surprised if Steelers-Seahawks was flexed in, but my inclination is that it won’t be. Final prediction: No changes (for now).