Bengals were one of the only teams to get flexed out of Thursday Night Football, but that could change with this new rule.
The NFL has long had an issue with being stuck with bad games in prime time slots. It got worse when they introduced Thursday Night Football games.
The NFL recently adopted an option to flex a game from that Sunday following the Thursday night game onto Thursday. They just need to do it with 28 days of notice.
That was used last season to take the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns out of Week 16’s Thursday Night Football to be replaced with the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Chargers, which had much more playoff implications.
The NFL owners voted to reduce that notice down to 21 days.
Source: NFL owners passed a resolution allowing the league to flex Sunday games to Thursday night with 21 days’ notice.
Just one game was flexed over the past two seasons via a temporary resolution that allowed it with 28 days’ notice. Today’s vote keeps TNF Flex in the toolbox.
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) March 31, 2025
This will open the possibility of more games getting flexed. Another stipulation that still exists is teams being limited to only playing two Thursday Night Football games in a season, so teams can’t get screwed having to play more than that in a season.
The NFL hopes this could end the practice of highlighting terrible teams in one of their premiere slots, which they sold the rights to for a huge chunk of change. While it will probably help, there are still only so many times a team can play on the short week. We’ll see what impact this could have on the Bengals once the schedule actually comes out.
