Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.
On this week’s “Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast”, SportsBusiness Journal’s John Ourand explained how the rule guaranteeing CBS and Fox one-half of each division rivalry is hindering the league’s ability to flex out of bad games by seemingly confirming that CBS and Fox don’t have to protect games if they’re the only half of a division rivalry they’re scheduled to get:
Who's Down this week?
Have you seen the NFL's Week 10 schedule?Listen to the Marchand & Ourand Sports Media Podcast here:
Apple: https://t.co/sW7aL3vyxv
Spotify: https://t.co/ZMCSAzIFye
Google: https://t.co/5KgIqq3sxC pic.twitter.com/Oiu747fxhQSee AlsoFantasy football: Solutions to fill roster holes in 2024 NFL draftNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7 – MorganWick.comIntroducing the New NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch – MorganWick.com'Thursday Night Football' flex rules, explained: How NFL's potential TNF schedule changes will work in 2023 | Sporting News— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) November 9, 2023
Now, I’m not sure how much that rule has to do with the bad primetime games we’ve already gotten. Besides a number of games not falling in flexible windows, even with the guaranteed-division-rivalry rule it’s not like the league was lacking in alternatives to Bears-Chargers Week 8. It would have required some back-and-forth crossflexing to accommodate both the Rams and Chargers without giving CBS too many games in the late window, but that shouldn’t have been too much of an obstacle unless, as I’ve decided, the early flex is meant to be a very rare exception to the games it applies to being non-flexible, to be used only when an injury to a star player makes it truly dire and not as marketable as it used to be. But that may not be as much the case as I’ve thought: this week’s Jets-Raiders game apparently got to the point of the networks issuing protections, with Fox reportedly protecting Niners-Jaguars despite not moving it to the late window or otherwise moving away from Giants-Cowboys as their lead late game, because the Cowboys-Giants half of the rivalry had already aired on NBC. (On that note, shortly after the bit in the clip Marchand and Ourand were reminded that there are three games between teams with winning records this week, including Niners-Jaguars… and all three are in the early window, and in fact all three are on Fox so no one will be getting more than one of them without Sunday Ticket.) And the rule certainly is greatly limiting the league’s options in the main flex period, as we’ve had plenty of opportunity to explore in this space.
What would I do about it? Really, there’s not much that can be done beyond taking more care in the construction of the schedule. One thing I would do is space out divisional games as evenly as possible across the season. Each division has 12 divisional games, two of which have to be played Week 18; multiply by eight divisions and that’s 80 games over 17 weeks, or about five a week with five weeks getting four. Those five weeks, if possible, should all be in the main flex period. In addition, for any division game scheduled for one of the primetime packages, CBS or Fox’s half of those games should be scheduled for September or October before the main flex period kicks in, and games with one half scheduled for Week 18 should have the other half scheduled either in the first half of the season, or very late in the season, around Week 15-16, so the league has some idea of the likelihood that the Week 18 game will be suitable/desirable for a move to NBC or ESPN. Balancing all of that is not necessarily practical, and might not be desirable for CBS or Fox, but I feel like it should be a goal the league should aspire towards.
Of course, there’s a reason Fox didn’t back out of a game involving the woeful Giants as its lead late game in favor of Niners-Jaguars or any of the other games involving teams with winning records: how good a team is doesn’t necessarily correlate that well with how desirable the games involving them are.
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 Peaco*ck 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 12: Time’s just about up to find a replacement for Bears-Vikings and the options really are not very good. I wouldn’t necessarily say this is the first week where the impact of the guaranteed-division-rivalry rule is indisputable without any sort of external reporting; the league was already reticent to give both halves of a division rivalry to primetime packages, so I’m not convinced it would flex Steelers-Bengals in under those circ*mstances. Nonetheless, your best options involve teams at 4-5 likely needing to win, and one of them depends on Saints-Falcons a) not being protected and b) the league being fine with cutting off their ability to make Falcons-Saints an NBC or ESPN game Week 18, and there’s a pretty decent chance that game could decide the division.
That leaves Chiefs-Raiders and the possibility of maxing the Chiefs out on primetime appearances. The good news is that I don’t think there are any more opportunities to flex the Chiefs in the rest of the year until Week 18, so you’re not cutting off any future flexing opportunities. The bad news is that this would put the Chiefs on Monday night in consecutive weeks, which I think the league would try to avoid. The Bears are so woeful that even their Thursday night win against the Panthers doesn’t completely inoculate their game from being flexed out, but the Raiders would absolutely have to win this week, and even then, between the consecutive Monday night games for the Chiefs and the Bears and Vikings bringing considerable name value as NFC North teams, I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. Final prediction: No changes.
Week 13: Another reason not to flex in Chiefs-Raiders is that it would give the Chiefs three consecutive primetime games overall, and right now I don’t think their game against the Packers is bad enough to flex out given that the best available alternative involves a team at 5-4 when the Packers are only a game and a half below that mark at 3-5, to say nothing of how Lions-Saints doesn’t bring a whole lot in terms of name value, or that all the other options involve teams at 4-5 or worse. The Packers haven’t exactly looked… good… and beating the Rams doesn’t say a whole lot about how decent they might be, but these are still two of the marquee franchises in the NFL and the possibility of a Swift sighting will always be catnip to the networks.
Week 14: Looks like Pats-Steelers is keeping its spot, so our attention this week turns towards the possibility of Titans-Dolphins losing its spot, or of Texans-Jets switching places with Packers-Giants. I don’t think the latter is going to happen given the name value disparity, and I think the Titans are okay enough that any alternative game would have to blow the league away to flex out Titans-Dolphins, and I don’t think Jaguars-Browns with the Browns at 5-3 qualifies. For the record, while Vikings-Raiders is probably the best game Fox could have protected, I have them protecting Rams-Ravens and I’m not sure I would rule out Lions-Bears either. (By the way, when a game between the two teams expected to be fighting for the NFC West is trapped in the late singleheader when the game in Seattle is on Thanksgiving night, that’s what I mean when I say the league should be taking more care in the construction of the schedule. I don’t think this would have happened this way if the league didn’t get a late start on finalizing the schedule while waiting for Aaron Rodgers and Lamar Jackson to finalize their new deals.)
Week 15: Not much to say here than what I’ve been saying the past few weeks. Vikings-Bengals, Steelers-Colts, and Broncos-Lions continue to be the strongest candidates for a Saturday move, with Broncos-Lions holding the edge over Bears-Browns because of the Broncos’ head-to-head win over the Bears, the stardom of even a depleted Russell Wilson compared to an absent Justin Fields, and the Lions being a better team than the Browns. It’s definitely a situation that could change in future weeks, but for the moment things seem pretty clear. Meanwhile Eagles-Seahawks for Chiefs-Patriots continues to look like our first really strong flex candidate of the season in a conventional primetime window; I think losing Cowboys-Bills will scare Fox more than losing Eagles-Seahawks would. Because of that I think the league will leave Chargers-Raiders alone as any other TNF-qualified games would involve teams with the same or worse record as the Raiders at the moment.
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. The chances of Vikings-Lions potentially deciding the division Week 18 is becoming more and more realistic, but if the Texans continue to win and the Rams continue to tumble, Browns-Texans may start looking like a viable flex candidate. The problem, though, is that with TNF being the only flex-eligible window CBS doesn’t need to protect Trumps-Jets, the game it would probably be more inclined to protect otherwise, and meaning CBS would just need to choose the game it’d rather protect between Browns-Texans and Titans-Seahawks. Colts-Falcons would still be an option, but I don’t think it’s quite good enough to justify flexing Saints-Rams out for just yet.
Week 17: Other than Chiefs-Patriots, Packers-Vikings might be the most likely game 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 (with Chargers-Broncos getting an honorable mention). 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.
Week 18: Here are all the Week 18 games that are rematches of games airing on the wrong conference’s network: Cowboys-Sheriffs, Bucs-Panthers, Texans-Colts. Not a lot, and Cowboys-Sheriffs is the only game that looks like it has a decent shot to be desirable to move to NBC or ESPN at the moment, but still, it’s a bit head-scratching that these games would be scheduled this way to begin with, especially Sheriffs-Cowboys being scheduled on Thanksgiving on CBS when you generally have to pry Cowboys games out of Fox’s cold dead hands. At the moment Bucs-Panthers, Bears-Packers, Eagles-Giants, and the NFC West games seem unlikely to be in line for a move, and on the AFC side the same would appear to be the case for Broncos-Raiders and the AFC South games, with a number of other games being longshots, but at this early date there are more games with a chance of going to NBC or ESPN than without. Even Texans-Colts might have a better chance than I’m giving it credit for considering how immersed the entire AFC North is in the playoff mix.
