Starting in 2006, when Sunday Night Football moved from cable to broadcast, the NFL began utilizing the ability to slide bad games away from the big platform, replacing them with more compelling matchups. The flex scheduling concept has more recently spread to other prime-time windows, with Thursday night and Monday nights now in the mix.
Setting aside the fact that flexing games not by hours but by days creates logistical issues and potential expenses for fans traveling to games, if the league is going to prioritize harvesting large audiences over in-stadium fan convenience, there’s more work to be done.
Specifically, the Thursday/Monday flexing needs to begin earlier.
For Monday games, flexing is available from Weeks 12 through 17 (with 12 days notice). For Thursday games, it’s available from Weeks 13 through 17 (with 21 days notice).
It’s now Week 11. And the Monday night game has the Raiders hosting the Cowboys. In contrast, the Week 11 Sunday slate has MANY better games that could have been moved to Monday night. (The same concept applies to the Thursday night game, which puts the 2-7 Jets in a standalone window.)
The mid-season, non-flex donut hole raises another important point. When the league is putting the schedule together, it’s critical to get the Thursday and Monday games right from, say, late October until the flex window opens. The potentially “bad” teams should have any prime-time games early in the year, before their records fully expose their flaws. The Raiders — a team anyone paying even casual attention to the NFL knew or should have known would struggle this year — nevertheless had a Thursday night game in Week 10 and a Monday night game in Week 11.
The best candidate to move to Week 11 Monday night would have been Seahawks-Rams, which is currently hidden in a 4:05 p.m. ET regional window. (Chiefs-Broncos is the big-platform 4:25 p.m. ET game.) Under current rules, however, Seahawks-Rams couldn’t have gone to Monday night because the rematch is set for a future Thursday night. And one of the two games in the annual rivalry must be available to Fox.
If the goal is to put the best games in prime time, that rule needs to go away. And, yes, it’s important not to rob Peter blind in order to provide Paul with compelling prime-time games, but there are enough “good” games to go around in most weeks (and especially in this week).
It should never happen that, in November, the Monday night game is one of the objectively least desirable games of a weekend that has Sunday afternoon games like Seahawks-Rams, Broncos-Chiefs, Buccaneers-Bills, Charges-Jaguars, Bears-Vikings, and Bengals-Steelers.
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