Well, here we are. I warned the league back in May that the surfeit of divisional games CBS was getting in Week 15 that were rematches of games on other networks, none of which were even slated for the lead late game, could end up depriving viewers of marquee games while resulting in questionable games being played in primetime, and the situation is arguably worse than I thought with Colts-Seahawks playing second fiddle in the late window. Sunday’s results actually did a lot to mitigate the problem, with the Bengals’ loss all but eliminating them from the playoffs and the Chiefs’ loss giving them too much of a hill to climb, but Chargers-Chiefs is still going to steal a good chunk of Bills-Patriots’ thunder.
The first person I saw on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter to complain about this situation, a Buffalo-area sports radio host, made an interesting point about how it could have been avoided and why CBS might have been willing to relinquish control of one of their divisional games:
We know that the Sunday afternoon networks can decide to relinquish control over a game they have the right to keep under the division-rivalry rule, because Mike North said as much last year, and his argument was similar to the above: that the network would still have plenty of games with major implications without the game they’d be losing. But the specific scenario he laid out involved the Sunday afternoon network getting the Cowboys back, even though there was a worse game in another primetime window at the time those comments were made, which suggests the level of compensation the league would have to have given CBS to make it worth their while – namely, that it would likely have to have involved Vikings-Cowboys in the Sunday night window, not Dolphins-Steelers on Monday night. In both cases NBC would have screamed bloody murder at losing a Cowboys game even if the game they were getting back had more playoff implications, which gets to the real obstacle with this scenario: if a game is valuable to one network, it’s valuable to the other.
But how valuable is a game to a network, really, if it’s buried on the depth chart and overshadowed by other games? Even before the Bengals lost this week CBS had slated Ravens-Bengals to be called by Spero Dedes and the network’s fifth-tier broadcast team. Let ESPN have that game in place of Dolphins-Steelers and you not only free up distribution for Bills-Patriots and Chargers-Chiefs, but you get back a team with a substantial regional and national fanbase as well.
Ignore for the moment that such a trade would have actually have involved ESPN trading down to a worse game based on the records of the worse teams, and that CBS would have been much less likely to be willing to relinquish Bills-Patriots or Chargers-Chiefs this way. The real problem is that, as much as the networks want marquee games in their windows, every game has value to them even if they have regional distribution, at least as long as the fans in the teams’ home markets are interested in the game. Typically the late afternoon window draws the largest audience of any single window of the week (regardless of whether it’s showing a single full national game or not), but the early doubleheader and singleheader windows combine to draw a larger audience than even that.
As much as fantasy football, gambling, and just interest in the league as a whole drive interest in the best games, NFL fandom is still largely parochial and regional, with people being interested in their own teams first and foremost. There’s a reason “Cowboys uber alles” exists: networks would rather have a Cowboys game than a game involving any other team, even if the Cowboys game is only marginally relevant to the playoff picture. Increasing the distribution of CBS’ divisional games might be what’s best for the league, but for CBS it doesn’t outweigh the loss of the Ravens and Bengals audiences unless they’re getting bigger fanbases with similar interest in their teams’ playoff hopes back, and if that’s the case it’s probably not worth flexing out in the first place, or at least the network losing it probably doesn’t want to lose it. (Witness the incident in 2016 where both CBS and NBC would have preferred to air Pats-Jets over a clearly superior Chiefs-Broncos game before the Chiefs became near-Cowboys-level popular, resulting in a bewildering swap of the late doubleheader and Sunday night windows.) Yes, two years ago the league was able to give ESPN Texans-Colts in Week 18 when the first game between the teams was on Fox, and this year Cardinals-Seahawks was scheduled to have one matchup on CBS and the other on TNF, but Week 18 is always a weird exception to the rules and the latter case was decided before the season under the assumption that Cardinals-Seahawks would bring little value (even though it was a borderline Tier 6 matchup). In the middle of the season, when games’ value is established, it takes a lot of doing to make a swap worth a network’s while.
I made this same point two years ago, the last time there was a game buried in the early window glaring enough and attracting enough complaining for me to dedicate the opening section to explaining it, specifically to explain why CBS kept an inferior Bengals-Chiefs game in the late window over a Dolphins-Ravens game to determine the AFC’s 1 seed. That’s not a factor here; to hear some people talk Packers-Broncos is a potential Super Bowl preview. But earlier this year I wondered what flexible scheduling actually meant to Monday and Thursday Night Football considering the restrictions on them and some of the games that were scheduled for supposedly-flexible windows, and this same line of thinking has me thinking about the league’s scheduling philosophy more generally. Because the league talks a good game about “playing your way into primetime”, and more generally making sure there’s a good game in every window, yet this situation was so predictable that I have to wonder how much the league even cares about allowing people to watch big games.
I called out this week’s schedule before the season (see the primetime appearance counts link below) because I recognized that CBS had no fewer than three games that were rematches of games on other networks, all of them potentially marquee games and all of them in the early window – Chargers-Chiefs was a Tier 2 game while Ravens-Bengals was the one Tier 1 game not scheduled for a marquee window. (Meanwhile, Fox’s best early-window game was expected to be Cardinals-Texans, on the border between Tiers 5 and 6, and with the Cardinals not performing particularly well none of Fox’s early-window games pit two teams with records better than 3-10, so while CBS has a surfeit of marquee games, Fox can’t help but bring you a game expected to be either a blowout or just terrible on Sunday afternoon – their only game with a spread of less than a touchdown is Trumps-Giants.) The Patriots weren’t expected to be good enough to make any of my tiers, but the idea that they might be a playoff team with Mike Vrabel, a coach who’d been successful in the past with the Titans, coaching Drake Maye wasn’t entirely out of the question, even if no one could have predicted they’d be this good. At the very least, the fact that you considered Patriots-Bills good enough to put on Sunday night suggests that it should be good enough to put in a marquee window under other circumstances. It’s the same frustration I had with Seahawks-Rams: if it’s good enough for a featured window, it’s good enough to get better treatment on a Sunday afternoon than this.
To be sure, CBS and Fox are not obligated to put every divisional game that’s a rematch of a primetime game on in the late doubleheader window – leaving aside that that’s not always possible, they tend to prioritize marquee teams and big markets in the late afternoon window more than the primetime packages. I think CBS’ streak of putting Ravens-Bengals on at 1 PM and not 4:25 is disrespecting the appeal of two of the marquee quarterbacks in the league, though Burrow’s injury issues and the Bengals’ struggles to put together a good record in the first two-thirds of the season has muted its appeal in recent years from what it should be on paper. But the league should at least be able to minimize how many of those games are trapped on the late singleheader or air on the same network in the same window in the same week.
I don’t blame Fox or the NFL for not making Seahawks-Rams a lead late doubleheader game considering the name value and expected quality of the Seahawks, and while I’d have preferred if it had been scheduled for a doubleheader week so Fox could maximize its distribution if desired, I understand that that might not universally be possible. But in a general sense, any divisional matchups that are guaranteed to CBS and Fox because the other half is scheduled for a primetime window – not those scheduled for Week 18 or the other Sunday afternoon network, unless it’s the other network’s lead late game – need to be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the season, and if any week must have three such games, one of them has to be the lead late doubleheader game, rather than the lead late game being a non-divisional game that’s still Tier 2 or 3. (Preferably, this would be the case if there were just two such games, but that might be too common to be avoidable.) Two years ago I suggested the league should schedule all divisional games as evenly as possible, which I recognized even then was probably a bridge too far for them, but it really is these rematches of primetime games that represent the biggest unforced error the league potentially makes in constructing the schedule.
When I put together my mock schedules, the only rule I have regarding how divisional matchups are scheduled goes the other way: a game that’s the lead late game on CBS or Fox needs to have its return match on another network. That’s because the goal of my mock schedules is to maximize distribution of the games expected to be best and avoid situations where the league would want to pull a flex if the season played out exactly as expected, not to minimize potential heartache involving lower-tier or untiered games placed in primetime windows just to fill out the schedule; the rule that all Tier 1 games and West Coast Tier 2 games must be placed in featured windows, and that any game in the top three tiers must at minimum be named lead 1 PM games with no other competition of that level, would be sufficient to avoid this particular situation, and West Coast Tier 3 games that don’t make any featured windows are actually required to go in the late singleheader, it’s just that they have to go in loaded weeks where there isn’t room for them in the main featured windows, or at least where the singleheader network has a bigger game to justify the late window’s lower distribution.
This situation, though, has me wondering if I should expand the purpose of the mock schedule to identify weeks and windows for the return match of every divisional matchup I place in primetime to ensure an even distribution of those games and avoid situations like this week. (Note that I placed Bills-Patriots on TNF and Rams-Seahawks in Week 18 without identifying specific weeks for their return matches, meaning if the league had adopted my mock schedule both games would likely have played, or been expected to play, second fiddle in their respective weeks and Rams-Seahawks would likely have been trapped as a late singleheader or secondary late doubleheader game.) I count 17 such games on my mock schedule, just enough for one return match a week, though realistically I’d have to schedule two in some weeks, and it takes me long enough to put together the mock schedule as it is that I don’t know if I’d be able to fit this in on top of that. But it might be worth considering if I have time next year.
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 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 this year there’s another such matchup and another matchup that has one game on the other conference’s network and the other in 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, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate 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 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. 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 more
7-3
9-2
2-9
8-2
5-5
4-6
