I thought I might have a chance to get this post up before we got too far into the Thursday night game, but the NFL caught me off guard by announcing Week 15 flexes for both Saturday and Monday night on Thursday afternoon. Possible this was driven by the desire not to cut it too close to announce the Saturday games, but regardless there wasn’t any reason not to announce this as early as Tuesday. I think I’m going to have to commit to posting these on Wednesday at the very latest from now on, at least until only six-day flexes are left, if I can find a way to bring myself to do that and have my brain in sufficient working order to do so. I’m going to try to capture my thinking prior to this announcement (and the chart also doesn’t reflect today’s news) and why that makes it all the more surprising.
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 15: Flexing in Eagles-Seahawks looked like much more of a sure thing when the Seahawks were sitting at 5-2 or 6-3 and competing for the NFC West lead than right now. They’ve hit a stretch of some tough opponents, such as the Ravens and Niners, but they’ve also completed being swept by a Rams team that’s 3-6 against non-Seahawks teams, and now they face a tough Thursday night test against the Cowboys in JerryWorld with a loss dropping them to .500. They’re still in playoff position at the moment, but the Packers and Rams have come on strong enough that it no longer looks like the non-NFC South playoff positions are all but set and the Seahawks are now only a game ahead of them, though being in danger of falling out of the playoffs might actually be a good thing compared to only fighting for seeding.
The Patriots are enough of a tire fire that Eagles-Seahawks is still clearly the superior game, and in fact at absolute worst the games could be equally lopsided if the Eagles and Pats win and the Seahawks and Chiefs lose, but at this point the Chiefs might be the second-most attractive team in the entire NFL and the Patriots and Bill Belichick still have plenty of name value of their own. I don’t know if there’s a scenario where I wouldn’t predict a flex, but at this point I would be completely understanding if the league stuck with Chiefs-Patriots and it wouldn’t even lead me to put much more stock in Mike North’s “playoff implications” comments from last week.
On the Saturday front, simply put, Monday’s game was arguably to determine whether Vikings-Bengals would lock up its spot on the Saturday slate or if Bears-Browns had a chance to catch it, and the result left things very much up in the air as, incredibly, the Bears, so widely mocked early in the season, are now only two games out of the playoffs, good enough to make the “waiting in the wings” section of the playoff picture graphic. Both teams now enter their bye week so their respective records won’t change, so this is going to be largely determined by the Browns and, especially, the Bengals. Keeping it close with the Cardiac Steelers doesn’t really say much about how good the Bengals might be with Jake Browning, and now they’re facing a Jaguars team that seems to be pretty firmly ensconced in the AFC’s second tier alongside the Dolphins and behind Baltimore and Kansas City, one it would be hard to blame them for losing unless they just got completely wiped off the field. The real problem is that with the Broncos and Texans playing each other, a loss is guaranteed to cause the Bengals to fall to at least a game and a half and probably two games out of the playoffs. Their saving grace might be that the Browns are dealing with their own quarterback injury situation, but a win against the Rams just might join up with the Bears’ name value and the lack of Joe Burrow to put Bears-Browns over the top.
Actual decisions:
- Philadelphia Eagles @ Seattle Seahawks to MNF. All the talk about Chiefs-Patriots having too much name value to move off of didn’t pan out, and the league clearly isn’t scared of a Seahawks losing streak making the game look lopsided. This also makes me breathe a sigh of relief that those “playoff implications” comments don’t mean too much for the league’s flexing priorities going forward. Note that Cowboys-Bills will now be a full national broadcast with no other game joining it at 4:25 ET, even though CBS has two 4:05 games that could have seen one of them crossflexed to Fox, and despite the lack of any scheduled full-national late doubleheader games raising the prospect that Sunday Ticket in the YouTube era was subject to additional protections against losing any afternoon games; however, Cowboys-Bills will still be available to Sunday Ticket as the Cardinals have had enough home games on the singleheader that they can enforce a blackout here. (Which might have been all the more reason to crossflex Niners-Cardinals, but presumably not depriving the Bay Area of Cowboys-Bills outweighed giving Arizona a full three afternoon games.)
- Minnesota Vikings @ Cincinnati Bengals, Pittsburgh Steelers @ Indianapolis Colts, and Denver Broncos @ Detroit Lions to Saturday on NFLN. Evidently the league is confident that the Bears’ stumbles and Browns’ injury situation trumps the lack of Burrow.
- Note that this is listed as a final Week 15 schedule, so don’t expect any changes to Cowboys-Bills or Ravens-Jaguars. Of course, there’s no reason to move away from Ravens-Jaguars, and there’s no way in hell Fox is ever going to move away from a playoff-bound Cowboys team for any reason. The next two weeks of posts will only include sections for Weeks 17 and 18.
Week 17: Look on the bright side, Amazon: you could be getting Aaron Rodgers for that Jets-Browns game! With that out of the way, all attention now focuses on Packers-Vikings, and the possibility that the Packers’ winning streak just might save it from being flexed, plus whether or not the Bengals stumble enough down the stretch for CBS to move out of Bengals-Chiefs for Dolphins-Ravens. Steelers-Seahawks is probably the best game available to Sunday night and is trapped in the late singleheader, but it’s also clearly the best game on Fox’s slate and now involves a team only a game better than the Packers. If Fox were to protect it, then the only options become games involving teams worse than the Packers. If we see more of the Packers team that beat the Lions this game will keep its spot. As mentioned earlier, the Jaguars won’t be much of a test for how good the Bengals are with Jake Browning at the helm; the games to watch on that front are Week 14 when the Bengals host the Colts and, to some extent, the Vikings game discussed above. If the Bengals win those games and maintain contact with the playoff race, and the Packers stumble against the Giants and Bucs the same two weeks, there may yet be room to call an audible and move Dolphins-Ravens to Sunday night.
Week 18: Cowboys-Sheriffs, Bucs-Panthers, and Texans-Colts are all rematches of games currently scheduled for the wrong conference’s network. The main Sunday night NFC contenders remain Vikings-Lions (though at this rate their Week 16 clash might be must-win for the Vikings to make it relevant in the right way to justify a move) and the NFC South games, as the Bears aren’t yet close enough to the playoffs for Bears-Packers to be in play as more than a Saturday option and Rams-Niners would be a delicate situation given the gap between the teams and the very different stakes they’d be playing for. Those games do remain options for Saturday, but Cowboys-Sheriffs might be fading too fast as the Cowboys’ playoff position firms up and Washington’s hopes remain on life support. In the AFC the North games remain the strongest contenders with Steelers-Ravens having a chance to decide the division and Browns-Bengals potentially deciding a playoff spot, with Texans-Colts potentially also being a winner-take-all game and Bills-Dolphins and Broncos-Raiders standing as dark horses.