The NFL’s 32 owners have voted to tweak the flex-scheduling formula for Thursday night games starting in 2025.
The upcoming season will mark the third year that the NFL has had the ability to flex Thursday night games. Under the rules that were put in place for 2023 and 2024, a Thursday night game could only be flexed if it took place between Weeks 13 and 17, and if a game did get moved, the league had to give 28 days notice. Under the new rule that was passed on Monday, per NFL Media, the NFL can now flex a Thursday game with just 21 days notice, so that now gives the league an extra week to decide whether a game needs to be flexed.
The approval came at the NFL’s annual league meeting in Florida.
In the two years that the Thursday flex has existed, only one game has been moved and that came last season. In Week 16, the Bengals and Browns were slated to play each other on Thursday night, but that game got bumped in favor of Broncos-Chargers.
In that instance, the NFL had to make the decision to move the game by Nov. 22 even though the matchup wasn’t scheduled to be played until Dec. 19. If this year’s proposal had been in place last season, the league could have waited until Nov. 29 to make a decision on the game. In the end, the Browns-Bengals game was moved from Thursday, Dec. 19 to Sunday Dec. 22 while the Broncos-Chargers game was moved from Sunday Dec. 22 to Thursday, Dec. 19.
When the original Thursday night flex proposal passed in 2023, it was a contentious vote. For a proposal to pass in the NFL, it needs 24 owners to vote it through, and the Thursday flex got exactly 24 votes.
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The Giants, Jets, Packers, Bears, Raiders, Lions, Bengals and Steelers were the teams who voted against the original proposal, but it’s not yet clear if those teams were for or against the new proposal. The owners who voted against the Thursday flexing rule back in 2023 thought it wasn’t fair to fans, who would be forced to change their travel plans if a game got bumped from Thursday to Sunday (or vice versa).
The NFL is allowed to flex up to two games per year during the five-week period where Thursday flexing is permitted.
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