There’s not a day that goes by that Jimmy Traina gets questions from fans about flex scheduling in the NFL, and NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning Mike North helped shed some light on how and why some late-season games get shifted out of a marquee slot in favor of a contest with higher competitive value.
North was a guest on SI Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina this week, and he explained that while it’s common in the media space to say that the networks flexed a particular game into primetime, ultimately the NFL is the one to make the final call.
“The networks have a lot of opportunity to request, suggest, encourage, cajole, arm twist, but at the end of the day there’s no two ways around it,” North said. “The National Football League makes the schedule, the commissioner of the National Football League makes every scheduling decision.”
North said that conversations with network partners NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, and now Amazon Prime take place on a regular basis and recommendations on flex scheduling get sent up the chain of command. Mike continued that it’s understandable for fans to be curious about decisions to flex or not to flex certain games.
“There’s always some questions, and the questions are fair,” he said.
North continued that it’s a common misconception that the goal of flex scheduling is to move the best game possible from the 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. windows on Sundays into a marquee timeslot.
“The one thing I think people fail to realize or remember is that the object of flexible scheduling for Sunday Night Football and now for Monday night and for Thursday night is never about getting the best game into primetime,” he said. “It’s about getting out of a game that has fallen short of expectations.”
North added that the goal of flex scheduling also isn’t to perceivably punish CBS or FOX by giving them the less-desirable matchup that gets flexed in favor of the preferred game.
“It’s a balancing act,” he said. “It’s trying to do right by everybody and it’s trying to do right by the fans. And if we’ve got a game in primetime that no longer has playoff implications, and there’s a game on Sunday afternoon on CBS or FOX that isn’t their very best game – so we’re not gutting them completely – that’s where you’ll see a flex along the way somewhere here I’m sure.”
“You’re literally taking a rating point or two from one partner and handing it to another partner,” North later added. “That’s why it’s a tough decision every week, and that’s why the guy upstairs (Roger Goodell) makes that decision.”
Mike finished by saying that while playoff implications tend to be a driving factor in whether a game gets flexed, there’s a bevy of other things to consider in the decision making process.
“We look at fan interest, we look at web traffic, we look at fantasy football ownership, we look at the betting markets, we look at hats and jersey sales,” he said. “It all goes into it, and we make our best guess as to how competitive we think that game is gonna be if it stays in primetime and what the viewership might be.”
