With recent changes to the NFL’s scheduling rules, the ability for the league to flex games around the schedule comes much earlier than it has in previous seasons. With a prime time game coming up that no longer looks particularly appealing, the Minnesota Vikings could, potentially, find themselves getting a game against one of their division rivals moved into a Sunday Night Football slot in a couple of weeks.
But there’s a catch.
The Week 8 Sunday Night Football matchup is currently slated to pit
the 2-4 Philadelphia Eagles against the 1-4-1 Washington Commanders. Now, under most circumstances, the league would rather perform a root canal sans novocaine on themselves rather than take an all-NFC East game out of prime time, but with Jalen Hurts now out for the season and neither of those teams looking particularly great, the league may be looking for other options.
One of those options could come from the NFC North, where the (currently) 5-0 Minnesota Vikings will be facing off with the (currently) 3-2 Detroit Lions at Ford Field in Week 8. If the season ended today, the entire NFC North would find themselves in the NFC playoff field, which could potentially make this an enticing matchup for the league to move to NBC.
There are two potential problems with this idea.
The first problem is that the league has to give twelve days notice before flexing this matchup to Sunday Night Football, which means they would have to make that decision. . .checks calendar. . .today. So, if it’s happening, we’ll know very soon.
The other, and potentially larger, issue, is that the league has a rule that mandates that at least one of the two home-and-home games in each divisional rivalry has to take place in one of the noon Sunday windows during the season. The reason that this is a problem is that the Vikings and Lions are already slated to meet in one prime time game in Week 15 when the two teams play one another at U.S. Bank Stadium. That’s already a scheduled Sunday Night Football matchup.
So, if the league wants to move the Week 8 Vikings at Lions matchup into a Sunday Night Football spot, they would have to move the Week 15 Lions at Vikings matchup out of the Sunday Night Football spot into the Sunday noon window that week and find another game to move into Sunday Night Football for Week 15.
Got all that?
Like I said, we should know relatively soon whether or not the league is flexing any game into the Week 8 Sunday Night Football spot to move Eagles/Commanders out of it. Of the Week 8 matchups, the Vikings/Lions game does appear to be the best potential option. It would also give the Vikings three prime time games in the stretch of four weeks: Week 8 on Sunday Night at Detroit, Week 9 on Monday Night against Buffalo at home, and Week 11 on Sunday Night against San Francisco in Mexico City.
If the league does decide to shift the Vikings’ schedule around, we will let you know as soon as the news drops.
