While the San Francisco 49ers get the short end of the stick with travel miles, gauntlets, and other NFL scheduling wizardry, there is one silver lining to take: the Thursday Night Football games. The 49ers only have one. Well, for now.
Now they do have two Thursday games. The 49ers begin their 2026 season in Australia against the Los Angeles Rams, but that is the first game of the season, and there’s no prior game they have to accelerate rest and recovery from. Their second Thursday game is the dreaded
Thursday Night Football rest—a Week 15 contest against the Los Angeles Chargers.
That is the only game the 49ers will have to play on a shortened week. It gets a bit better: If you look at the league schedule for Weeks 13-17 (when Thursday games can be flexed), it looks even less likely.
The 49ers have five prime-time games, tied for the third-most. The Rams sit alone with the most at seven total. Five games is the common number you see for competitive teams. The absolute maximum number of prime-time games a team can play in is eight.
That means the Rams can be flexed into one more prime-time game; Thursday Night, Monday Night, or Sunday Night.
And this is why you see the 49ers sitting at five games, or some teams at six. The NFL doesn’t want to max out a team’s prime-time schedule, and said team is having a train wreck of a season. On the flip side, they also don’t want to take a team that has things locked up in Week 15 and subsequently benching starters for the game.
With that said, the 49ers have three games they can be flexed into, and for them to be flexed into Thursday Night, it has to be in Weeks 13 through 17. The 49ers have one game already on Thursday against the Chargers in Week 15. So that leaves us with these three games:
- Week 13 At New York Giants
- Week 14 Vs. Los Angeles Rams
- Week 16 At Kansas City Chiefs
We’ll start with the Giants. The scheduled game for Week 13 is the Chiefs at Rams. That is going to be a major draw for ratings, provided the teams don’t fall apart. Knowing that, we can rest easy that the 49ers/Giants can’t do anything to bump who’s already on the schedule. Should the Rams/Chiefs be experiencing a nightmare season, there are other games more attractive: The Cincinnati Bengals vs. the Cleveland Browns and the Buffalo Bills vs. the New England Patriots come to mind.
Next, there’s Week 14. I doubt this would happen, also. As you’ve just read, the Rams would have just finished up a Thursday Night Football appearance and be the beneficiaries of a week of rest vs. the 49ers’ three days. Look, the NFL has done sketchy things to the 49ers in terms of rest in the past, but there’s no way they’d have one team with three days of rest go up against a team that had a week. At least, I’d like to think they wouldn’t do that. I looked around for the rule that says this isn’t possible, but couldn’t find anything. Rule or not, it just doesn’t seem like something the NFL would pull.
That leaves us with Week 16. The scheduled game is the Houston Texans at the Philadelphia Eagles, a decent game. You might be thinking the league would want the 49ers to play the Chiefs on prime-time, but there’s one problem: The Chiefs play Monday Night Football in Week 15 against the New England Patriots. That would give the Chiefs just two days of rest before hosting the 49ers.
There’s no way the league does that to Kansas City.
We then, of course, have the Week 15 matchup against the Chargers. Could the 49ers be flexed out of it? If one of the teams suffered a disaster, sure, but flexes aren’t as common as you might think. As it stands, it looks like the 49ers have a very high chance of not getting flexed into Thursday Night Football for 2026.
Below are the flex rules from the NFL. Do you see any other prime-time games the 49ers could get flexed into?
- The game that has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, or Thursday Night Football during the Flex Scheduling Windows will generally be listed at 8:20 p.m. ET, 8:15 p.m. ET, and 8:00 p.m. ET, respectively.
- The majority of games on Sundays will typically be listed at 1:00 p.m. ET during the Flex Scheduling Windows except for games played in Pacific or Mountain time zones, which will be listed at 4:05 or 4:25 p.m. ET.
- For Sunday Night Football in Weeks 5-13 and for Monday Night Football in Weeks 12-17, the NFL will decide and announce no later than 12 days in advance of the game, which game will be played on Sunday night and which game will be played on Monday night.
- For Sunday Night Football in Weeks 14-17, the flexible scheduling decision will generally be made no later than 6 days prior to the game.
- For Thursday Night Football in Weeks 13-17, the flexible scheduling decision will generally be made no later than 21 days prior to the game.
