NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

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The twentieth season (woo!) of the Flex Schedule Watch got off to a slightly early start on Monday with a Last-Minute Remarks post on the prospect of a Week 8 early flex. There, I mentioned that the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe had reported on the possibility that Eagles-Quinns could be flexed out, but I was skeptical about it actually happening given the constraints involved until the news broke about Jalen Hurts’ blood clot. Tucked in his report, though, was an intriguing possible tidbit about the flex schedule process:

Now, as I say in the tweet, I’d given up on figuring out any timeframe for protections being due under the current contract other than “at the same time the league has to make a decision”, so this being stated so matter-of-factly made me raise an eyebrow, but Tornoe interviewed the league’s schedule-maker Mike North about Eagles-adjacent flexing situations late in the first two seasons of the new contract, so he’s high on the list of people who would know what they were talking about. That said, this being applicable to the situation Tornoe was writing about would be surprising, as my impression was that regardless of anything else, when it came to early flexes CBS and Fox were able to make protections at decision time even when early flexes were introduced under the previous contract.

Still, is the evidence consistent with a three-week deadline to submit protections? Let’s look back on what clues we’ve gotten over the first three seasons of the current contract and see where things lead:

  • 2023 offseason: Mike North implies, and Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill confirms, that the universal Week 5 deadline for protections is no longer in effect under the new contract, with Mulvihill stating “without revealing too much it’s now significantly closer to each game date“. Meanwhile, the league institutes Thursday night flex scheduling; the original proposal would have given teams 28 days’ notice that a game could be flexed to Thursday night, with the actual decision coming with 15 days’ notice. The league ultimately decides to impose a 28-day deadline to make a decision overall. As such, my initial tentative conclusion is that protections need to come down four or five weeks in advance.
  • Week 10-11, 2023: On Tuesday, 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco tweets that Fox “plans to protect” Niners-Eagles for Week 13. This makes me conclude that “the deadline for protections is no more than three weeks in advance, and more likely runs right up to the point where the league needs to make a decision”, depending on whether the “plans to protect” phrasing is meant to imply that Fox could be making that protection right after or even before the tweet, or that it merely plans to make the protection after the following week’s games. In any case, at the time I still don’t know how this interacts with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes or the 6-day deadline for late-season SNF flexes.
  • Week 13, 2023: On Thursday the league announces Week 15 flexes, which is odd to me because it would otherwise seem to me that if the league wasn’t going to wait for the Week 13 results, they might as well have announced the changes as early as Tuesday. Then on Monday Andrew Marchand, then of the New York Post, reveals the horse-trading that went into those flexes, including that Fox didn’t need to protect Cowboys-Bills because they were guaranteed eight Cowboys games, and the league allowed them to take Bears-Browns from the Saturday pool to convince them to release their protection on (notably, not to refrain from protecting) Eagles-Seahawks. To date, this is the only known time that conference-network appearance minimums have come into play when it comes to flexing, and the Chiefs being scheduled for only seven CBS games the following year, and CBS still needing to protect one of those games, suggests that the way that rule works, or is used by the networks, is difficult to predict. For our purposes, it suggests a fairly short window for when the protection deadline might be: namely, the Wednesday or Thursday heading into the last week before a 14-day decision, basically 17 or 18 days out. (In the above-linked post I also deal with why CBS and Fox submitting protections whenever the league tells them they’re considering a flex, as was suggested to me at the time, both isn’t helpful to me and isn’t completely consistent with the league’s statements.) Two weeks later the league again confirms a schedule, this time without any changes, on the Thursday of the game week two weeks before the one in question, despite the week in question being a six-day flex window for intra-Sunday changes, and it happens again for Week 14 of 2025.
  • Week 11, 2024: Broncos beat writer Chris Tomasson says, in a tweet posted right before the start of the Thursday night game, that CBS is “expected to freeze” Eagles-Ravens on the Week 13 slate. That implies that CBS hasn’t yet submitted a protection as the Week 11 slate begins, but said expected protection is prefaced with “as previously noted” so it’s possible Tomasson is repeating something he’d previously reported and not gotten an update on. As far as I’m aware, this is the main piece of evidence against a three-week deadline for protections.
  • Week 12, 2024: Our first and so far only Thursday night flex is instituted when Broncos-Chargers replaces Browns-Bengals on the Week 16 slate, which I bring up here because it’s said that the flex was officially made minutes before the deadline, midnight on Thursday night/Friday morning. Under current rules, then, after the Thursday flex deadline was changed to 21 days in advance in the 2025 offseason, the deadline for a Week 16 Thursday flex would be right after the Week 13 Thursday night game, so the Thursday flex deadline is still a week before what the protection deadline would be.

All told, I don’t really see any reason not to take Tornoe’s statement as my assumption going forward, though I do note that the evidence in support of it is all from the first year of the current contract and the one piece of firm evidence since then, while flimsy, works against it. But I’m still going to work under the assumption that the deadline is still “when the decision has to be made” for early flexes, which is going to come into play right away.

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 early flexes are exceptionally rare and I generally only cover them 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 21 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, but what evidence exists suggests they’re submitted within a week or so of the two-week deadline; what that means for Thursday night flexes that are due earlier is unclear.
  • On paper, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. However, in 2023 some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime, and last year there was another such matchup and an additional matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in primetime.
  • No team may appear more than eight times in primetime windows – seven scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and no more than one team each season has been scheduled for seven primetime appearances. (Also, this rule originally limited teams to seven primetime appearances overall, being scheduled for six and flexed into a seventh, and I’m not entirely sure I trust the source reporting on the expansion because of its understanding of how Week 18 plays into it.) This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season (and an explanation of the caveats surrounding the change in the primetime appearance rule).
  • 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 without the team’s permission.
  • 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. Three more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday, one on Netflix and two 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.

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Last-Minute Remarks on NFL Week 8 Flex Scheduling Decisions

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Week 8 (SNF early flex ): Earlier this week the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Rob Tornoe reported that the NFL was considering flexing out Eagles-Quinns from the Week 8 Sunday Night Football slot. While I briefly considered starting the full-size Flex Schedule Watch a week earlier than planned to accommodate this, ultimately I was content to let this serve as the extent of my analysis:

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How Might the Integration of CBS Sports and TNT Sports Play Out?

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Well sports fans, you got your wish. Are you happy now?

Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, when the cable bundle still seemed to rule the world of entertainment, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of CBS and the outfit then known as Turner Sports teaming up to retain the former’s rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, a number of sports-focused media watchers wondered about the possibility of CBS and Turner’s then-owner, Time Warner, merging. From a sports perspective, it seemed to make sense: while Disney, Comcast, and Fox all had both broadcast and cable outlets to air sports, CBS had a broadcast network but its only suitable cable outlet was the poorly-distributed CBS Sports Network, while Turner had perhaps the best non-ESPN collection of sports rights on cable, but no broadcast network. I felt this was a simplistic, myopic analysis that didn’t take into account the whole picture of how well the two companies might fit together – most obviously, Time Warner-owned HBO and CBS-owned Showtime were the top two names in premium television networks, plus you’d have the separate news operations of CBS and CNN – and that became even more so when CBS re-merged with Viacom and picked up a real base of cable networks again, including Nickelodeon which has a long-standing competition with Warner-owned Cartoon Network, as well as reuniting with the Paramount movie studio, one of several major studios alongside Warner Bros. I actually thought Fox’s brief dalliance with buying Time Warner made more sense, even from a sports perspective.

Well, last week, the merger of the two companies closed, with the merged company having no trace of either company in its name, operating under the Skydance name inherited from the media company David Ellison originally picked up before buying first Paramount and now Warner Bros. Discovery. In most corners of the Internet, the reaction has generally been a sense of dread, partly over the prospect of lost jobs and draconian cost-cutting to pay down the massive debt the Ellison family has racked up in these transactions (not to mention the debt inherited from WBD), but also what some fear is the real purpose of the transaction: turning CNN into right-wing propaganda, once Bari Weiss, the person Ellison installed as head of CBS News who promptly pushed the division into being more conservative-friendly and less critical of Trump, gets her hands on it. Certainly Paramount Skydance was the only company interested in keeping WBD’s cable networks in the fold; WBD planned to split into separate companies for its studios and networks before Ellison began his hostile takeover attempt, and when WBD courted Netflix as an alternative, that transaction would have involved only the studios portion of the split. What might once have been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a CBS-Warner merger, negotiating the potential merger of CBS News and CNN and the potential regulatory hurdles presented by it, not only wasn’t a problem for the Trump FCC and DOJ, but the whole reason why it happened.

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The Pros and Cons of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Process Overhaul

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Two years after the introduction of the biggest change to its selection process since at least 2004, on Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced what may be the biggest change to its selection process ever.

Much like the 2024 changes, these changes have two main components to them. First, the main selection committee is being reduced in size from 50 members to 28, three of which will be designated nonvoting participants each year. This means it is no longer possible for there to be representatives for each of the 32 NFL teams, as was the case with the prior makeup of the selection committee; all 27 selectors (outside the representative of the Pro Football Writers of America) will be chosen at large.

The bigger change, though, at least from the perspective of fans, is the elimination of the Senior category. All players, regardless of how long they have been retired, will be considered in a single pool. 13 players will be named as finalists and be considered alongside one coach and one contributor, each chosen by subcommittees. (In one sense, this is something of a return to the status quo prior to the centennial class of 2020, when coaches moved through the same selection process as players.) The definition of a contributor is also expanding to encompass candidates’ “full football resume that may include playing, coaching and other contributions to the sport”; I don’t know if that effectively serves as a way to create a potential 14th player or coach slot, or if this is just a way of sanctioning something like Doug Williams’ inclusion in the 2025 contributor process (and also potentially making it easier for influential assistant coaches like Clark Shaughnessy to find a way in).

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Is the PGA Tour’s Overhaul Really as Big a Change as It’s Being Hyped Up To Be?

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On Tuesday the PGA Tour announced a “new competitive structure” beginning in 2028 involving “two distinct series of tournaments” that it billed as being linked by a structure of promotion and relegation: the Championship Series, consisting of about 23 tournaments with the ones managed by the Tour having 120-player fields and purses of at least $20 million, and the Challenger Series, consisting of about 20 tournaments with fields of about 144 players and purses of at least $4 million. This has been described as a “split” of the existing tour that will make it “look fundamentally different“, a “complete and total transformation“, and as “one of the most significant structural changes in modern golf history“.

But reading the Tour’s announcements, I was struck by two things. First, there was no mention of the Korn Ferry Tour, the Tour’s existing developmental, second-level tour, only the continued existence of the “Q-School” qualifying tournament that has long allowed golfers to qualify for the main tour and the KFT. Second, and more importantly, the Championship Series doesn’t seem to have that many fewer players than the main tour today. Which raises the question: is this really a “split”, or just a rebranding of the KFT?

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Assessing the 2026 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

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This is one of the most bizarre NFL schedules I can remember, certainly since I started sorting games into “tiers” before the schedule release. There are several reasons for this that I’ll get into as we go along, but perhaps the biggest is that, despite neither the Bengals nor Jaguars qualifying for Tier 1, no fewer than four games that could have ended up in Tier 1 did not end up in featured windows (admittedly with two of them involving the Chargers, which has two games falling into Tier 2) – the most eyebrow-raising of which must certainly be Ravens-Bills Week 8. The two quarterbacks that squared off for the 2024 MVP, who put on an overtime thriller on Sunday night last year, get a 1 PM ET game when I would have thought it would have been one of the most coveted games for the network partners to put in featured windows?

“You could put Baltimore-Buffalo in any of our primetime packages and any one of our partners would have been thrilled to get it, and you might’ve had 18 or 20 million people watching that game,” Mike North said on a Friday conference call. “As a 1 o’clock anchor for CBS, it may get 75% of the country. You might have more people watching that game Sunday on CBS at 1 o’clock than you might have if it was on Monday night or Thursday night. It reaffirms our commitment to keeping Sunday afternoon strong.”

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What the 2026 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

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The NFL schedule is set to be released on Thursday, and as I’ve done the last two years, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, at least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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The NCAA Is Expanding March Madness Solely to Spite Fox Sports

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It all could have been avoided if Fox and the NCAA had managed to work together.

It was first reported in September of 2023 that Fox was looking to create a new college basketball postseason tournament for teams in the three conferences that it has rights to: the Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East. The proposed tournament would have 16 teams and be played entirely in Las Vegas, and would effectively deprive the venerable NCAA-owned NIT of teams from those conferences. In response to the prospect of the new tournament, and with NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt acknowledging that “the very viability of the [NIT] could be in jeopardy”, the NCAA announced a series of sweeping changes to the NIT selection process, eliminating the automatic bids previously given to regular-season conference champions left out of the NCAA tournament and replacing them with a minimum two teams from each of the then-six major conferences with each of them guaranteed to host a game, which stood to greatly increase the number of spots going to power-conference teams at the expense of mid- and low-majors. Nonetheless, Fox and Anschutz Entertainment Group announced the launch of the College Basketball Crown that April with the first tournament to be held the following year, with a minimum of two teams from each of the three conferences Fox has the rights to and the remaining ten teams being chosen at-large.

After the first year, Fox and AEG announced they had “streamlined” the tournament by cutting it from 16 teams to eight, the likely reason for which was probably apparent when one looked at the inaugural bracket and saw three to five (depending on how you count Washington State and Oregon State) mid-majors included, including Boise State, which was actually the only team in the main NCAA tournament’s “First Four Out” to appear in any postseason tournament despite the other three coming from the Big 12 and Big Ten. Both years, though, the impact of the new tournament on the NIT has been evident and stark. In each of the last two years, only four out of 32 teams in the NIT have come from major conferences, including, oddly enough, Oklahoma State out of the Big 12 both years. Despite being entitled to two automatic bids, the SEC sent no teams to the NIT in 2025 and only one in 2026, though Auburn ended up winning the whole thing. But 2026 also saw perhaps the ultimate statement of the CBC’s triumph over the NIT: rather than going to mid-majors or the conferences that were contracted to it, the CBC’s two at-larges went to one team from the ACC and one from the SEC. The CBC had as many SEC teams as the NIT did, and they picked Oklahoma, who had beaten out Auburn as the first team out of the NCAA Tournament. After just two years, it was apparent that even for the teams that nominally should have been on the side of the NIT, the CBC had established itself as the more prestigious tournament, reducing the NIT to the status the CBI (seemingly fully killed by all this) once had: a third-tier tournament primarily for mid-majors.

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Tipping Picks Is a Rejection of the NFL’s Potemkin Draft

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A few days before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft, Peter Schrager took to his podcast and social media to beg viewers to stay off social media and not spoil themselves with each pick. Part of his argument was that reporters who get the pick before it’s announced aren’t actually doing anything special:

It’s because the NFL requires that name to be sent to them, and the entire league gets that name three minutes before the pick is made. Anyone who’s got a credential has one source in the league, and that one source in the league, whether it be from the 32 teams or the league office or an agent, they have access to the picks 90 seconds before they’re announced. There is no valor in spoiling an NFL draft pick, so don’t give that joy or that “attaboy” to those who are leaking it beforehand.

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Continuing the Quest for a Solution for NBA Tanking

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Last week’s post laid out the argument that the only true solution for tanking in the NBA is a system of promotion and relegation, but also acknowledged that the NBA owners would never adopt such a system on their own. But I also got a bit carried away listing some of the solutions that others had proposed, some of which weren’t intended to be that serious to begin with, and some of which I got intrigued by as I looked into them. So if promotion and relegation isn’t on the table, how should the NBA address tanking?

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