Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday or Saturday night games.
Perhaps predictably, over the past week social media has erupted with people moaning about why Dolphins-Ravens, the game likely to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, is trapped in the early singleheader, why it wasn’t moved to 4:25 or Sunday night. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in recent years, and CBS sure is trying its best to show it to as much of the country as possible, but it is notable that even leaving aside the jockeying between networks and the increased protections CBS and Fox get in the new contracts, this game could have easily been moved to the late afternoon and stayed on CBS. Instead, before any of last week’s games were even played CBS opted to stick with the Burrow-less disappointing Bengals against the Chiefs. Lo and behold, once the week’s results played out the Bengals’ win streak with Jake Browning at quarterback had come to an abrupt halt, leaving the Bengals hanging on to the possibility of a playoff spot by a thread, and the Chiefs had stumbled to the Raiders, keeping the silver and black’s own threadbare playoff hopes alive and nearly locking the Chiefs into the 3 seed, especially when coupled with Dolphins and Ravens wins against two of the best teams in the NFC.
It’s a reminder that as much as the NFL has a nationalized fanbase, the people who want to watch the best, most important games between the best teams, at least in the regular season, are still a distinct minority compared to those that just want to watch the teams they’re fans of or the most attractive, biggest-name teams. A Chiefs game this year always carries the possibility of a Taylor Swift bump, but even without the Swift factor the Chiefs are one of the three most attractive teams in the league right now, by far the most attractive in the AFC, the most dominant team in the league in recent years with some of its biggest stars. They’re not the Cowboys – if the Chiefs-Patriots game that got flexed out earlier this year for Eagles-Seahawks had been Cowboys-Patriots I think it keeps its spot – but they are one of those teams that can pop a rating by their mere presence. On the flip side, let’s not forget that the Dolphins produced one of the worst December Sunday Night Football ratings ever when they were flexed in down the stretch of last season – contributing to the league’s decision to plug Lions-Packers into Sunday night of Week 18 instead of a game that wouldn’t become meaningless for one team by the time it kicked off. Couple that with the Bengals and Chiefs still being very much in the playoff hunt, and that’s why my prediction last week was that if Dolphins-Ravens was going to be moved to a later time at all, it would be into Sunday night, not the late afternoon window.
That being said, while the games scheduled for featured windows before the season are determined as much by popularity as by how they’re expected to perform, the flexible scheduling regime is still governed by how good the teams are. The game originally scheduled for a primetime window will keep its spot unless there’s a compelling reason to move out of it, but if it is flexed out the game that replaces it will generally be determined by what game has the best pair of records, and there have been times when a passable game scheduled for Sunday night has nonetheless been flexed out in favor of a game that seemed to be too good to be as weakly distributed as it otherwise would have been. Mike North has repeatedly stated in recent seasons that the league wants to give every playoff team exposure in national windows before the playoffs so that audiences have some familiarity with the team before the playoffs hit – obscure, unpopular, yet good teams aren’t going to become more popular if they continue to languish in obscurity. So the NFL does try to put the best games in the best windows.
Well, Dolphins-Ravens ranked #4 on my list of Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t that I wrote before the season, where I even raised the prospect of it being flexed in for Packers-Vikings. In my tier structure based on preseason win totals at sportsbooks I introduced a few weeks ago, it was a Tier 2 game, meaning if the best games of the year were distributed evenly, it would be the second-best game of its week. Given the poor ratings for the Dolphins on SNF last year and the perception that the AFC North was still the Bengals’ to lose, I can’t completely fault the league for not putting the game in a featured window to begin with, but I can fault the league for scheduling it this late in the season but punting it to the early doubleheader while giving the Sunday night timeslot to a game involving a Packers team expected to finish below .500, New Year’s Eve or no. The league had to be aware that if things played out exactly as expected, CBS would have two games between big-time playoff contenders with win totals no lower than 9.5 while SNF would have a game involving a team on the fringes of the playoff picture at best, yet because CBS was scheduled for only eight Chiefs appearances the league wouldn’t be able to flex either one in. To be sure, the league and CBS couldn’t have figured that, while CBS would have the game between the AFC’s two best teams, it wouldn’t be the one they thought it’d be. Still, I feel like while the league and its TV partners can mess around with games involving popular teams for the first three months of the season, once December hits they need to stop messing around. If the flexible windows don’t contain what are expected to be the best games of their respective weeks, not counting games in featured inflexible windows, then the games that are the best need to be in a position where they can be flexed in, period. At the very least, if they’re serious about “playing your way into primetime” they need to minimize the risk of something like this happening.
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.
Read moreNFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 16
