So in the early part of this year’s iteration of this feature, I was able to fill this introductory section with some discussion of how the week’s results shaped the flex scheduling picture on a high level, leaving the details for the body of the post. In the middle portion, there seemed to be new articles or news about flex scheduling just about every week, and this section became invaluable as a place for me to leave my comments about them. Now we’re hitting the last few weeks, with only two flex scheduling weeks left, and I’m not sure what to put here. That was already the case a few weeks ago when the surprise announcement of the Week 15 flexes before the Week 13 games bailed me out, but it’s even more acute here. There’s not much in the way of anything general I could say that would apply to both weeks, although the situation in the NFC North does apply to both, and for the most part, the situations themselves are cases where I’m basically twiddling my thumbs waiting for the clock to run out. In the past this would be the last week before a decision on Week 17 flexing needed to be made, but now that there’s a formal six-day window involved there’s one more week to go through before it’s time to make any sort of firm prediction.
I will say that, despite it being responsible for knocking out a week of the Flex Schedule Watch entirely some years ago, and the NFL rendering it worthless last year, I do intend to calculate the percentage chances of each game being moved to Sunday night again. Call me crazy, but as long as I’m doing this feature I should provide some sort of structure and context to the options for the final week as we come down the stretch. Right now I’m mostly providing shots in the dark in terms of what games are in the running and why, and I should get down to business trying to figure out what the actual scenarios are. But it means next week’s post could take a long time to put together again, especially since I’m flying to Seattle next Wednesday, and also I expect John Ourand’s year-end predictions column Monday so I’d likely need to find time to squeeze that and the annual blog-day post in over the course of the week.
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 17: This week’s Monday night result worked out a bit better for CBS and the league than last week. Had the Dolphins won, they and the Ravens would have had a collective two-game lead against all other comers for the #1 seed in the AFC, and the game between them would have almost certainly decided who would claim it. It’s still most likely going to be one of them picking up the first-round bye, but the door is at least open for the Swifties to sneak in and take it from both of them. The Packers’ loss also reopens the possibility of pulling the Sunday night flex, though 6-7 is still good enough for the last playoff spot in the top-heavy NFC (where there are four teams at 9-4 or better, one team at 7-6 that feels worse than that, and everyone else below .500). But switching the places of Packers-Vikings and Dolphins-Ravens, making the former CBS’ new lead early game, when both the Packers and Vikings remain very much in the playoff hunt, would be going down a path that the league has legitimately rarely taken, let alone would go against Mike North’s “playoff implications uber alles” statements. A lot may depend on whether there’s a chance the Packers, Vikings, or Bengals could be eliminated by game time.
Week 18:Don’t look now, but the Vikings actually control their own destiny to win the NFC North. They’re down two to the Lions with both games against them still to play, so if they win out, even if the Lions win the other two games, they’d steal the division. If the Vikings win their next three, the Lions would only need to win one of the remaining two – because if the Vikings win their next three while the Lions lose their next three, the Vikings would improbably clinch the division before Week 18, and with the Lions having dates with the red-hot Broncos and Cowboys while the Vikings have winnable contests with the Bengals and Packers, that’s very much within the realm of possibility. Of course the Vikings team that only mustered a single field goal in the last two minutes against the Raiders seems unlikely to do that, but the Lions are going to have to play a lot better than they have if they want to give Detroit fans their first division crown and home playoff game since 1993.
Cowboys-Sheriffs, Bucs-Panthers, and Texans-Colts are all rematches of games currently scheduled for the wrong conference’s network. Besides Vikings-Lions, the NFC South games remain the chief Sunday night candidates from the NFC, while Seahawks-Cardinals and Bears-Packers are potential candidates to move to Saturday; if the Niners lose their next three while the Rams win their next three Rams-Niners would decide the division, but that’s extremely unlikely and in lieu of that, the very different stakes the two teams would be playing for make even a Saturday move doubtful. In the AFC Texans-Colts appears to be strongest as a potential winner-take-all game, with the AFC North games currently looking like they pair off wrong (Ravens-Steelers’ chances to decide the division might not survive the weekend and it seems unlikely for Browns-Bengals to have guaranteed consequences for both teams, and it probably doesn’t have enough buzz for the league to pull a Lions-Packers with it), but either could still move to Saturday as could Broncos-Raiders, and Jaguars-Titans and Chiefs-Chargers could also move to Saturday as games that could determine seeding order among division winners. Bills-Dolphins has a shot at either Saturday or Sunday night, but could be in a similar place as Rams-Niners if it doesn’t decide the division. More on all this coming next week.
