Throughout the NFL season, the league has enacted its flex scheduling ability to ensure that compelling matchups air on prime time television. The league announced that the Week 17 matchup between the Atlanta Falcons and Washington Commanders, which was originally slated to be played on CBS, will now air on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. CBS Sports will instead air the game between the Miami Dolphins and Cleveland Browns at 4:05 p.m. EST. NFL Network is now airing a tripleheader of matchups with playoff implications on Sunday, Dec. 28.
Earlier in the week, the league changed the start of the Week 16 game between the Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots to 4:25 p.m. EST on CBS while moving the Cleveland Browns’ matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals to CBS at 1 p.m. EST. The game was originally slated to air on Prime Video, but it ended up becoming the first game flexed out of Thursday night and moved to 1 p.m. EST on FOX. CBS Sports has had several games moved during the regular season, and it is something that Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo articulated goes back to the plethora of media partners who air live NFL games.
“There’s too many mouths to feed,” Russo said on Tuesday’s edition of Mad Dog Unleashed on SiriusXM Mad Dog Sports Radio. “Whether it’s Amazon, Netflix, CBS, FOX, ESPN, NBC, ‘Let’s throw our own NFL Network a game or two,’ there are too many places they got to put these games. They might get a great rating, and Buck’s going to tell me that the Cincinnati-Dallas game – which I didn’t watch one play of and I’m proud of it – they got 18 million. Well, they play fantasy football, what can I tell you. The game meant nothing.”
Russo proceeded to question why CBS Sports has seemingly been the subject of these flex scheduling changes this season. In fact, he questioned whether NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell did not like longtime CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus retiring from the company earlier in the year.
“Think about it,” Russo implored. “They took five games away from CBS. They cannot be happy, with all the money they spent. They took five games away from CBS for the next two weekends, if you include Denver and the Chargers moving to Amazon for Thursday night. They took five days away, so poor [Andrew] Catalan, who hates to fly the redeye, has got to go to Vegas for the Jacksonville game this week.”
Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS Sports, is in the second season of a 10-year media rights deal with the NFL for which it reportedly pays $2.1 billion annually. The company presented Super Bowl LVIII to conclude the 2023 season, drawing 123.7 million viewers across linear and digital platforms for the most-watched iteration of the championship game of all time.
CBS Sports will broadcast the Super Bowl again to conclude the 2028 season as Paramount Global currently prepares to complete a two-step M&A transaction in which Skydance Media is acquiring the parent company. The NFL reportedly has the right to opt out of its media rights contracts with Paramount Global, FOX Corporation, Comcast and Amazon after the 2029 season.
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