A great Week 13 NFL schedule marred by terrible Sunday night matchup

All five games are during the 1:00 p.m. EST or 4:00 p.m. EST window, meaning some fans are going to have to watch Green Bay at Chicago or Pittsburgh at Atlanta instead of one of several marquee games on the docket.

It also means that when given a chance to flex Sunday night’s Indianapolis-Dallas game out of primetime for a much better matchup, the NFL decided it wanted to showcase Jeff Saturday. Maybe this week he learned what timeouts are and what they do.

Per 506 Sports, the Kansas City-Cincinnati game has the largest audience, but people on the west coast will get a game between the Chargers and Raiders instead of the AFC Championship rematch.
 
Many of those people will at least have the chance to watch Miami-San Francisco; except for the poor folks in Los Angeles, who will have to suffer through a Seattle-Los Angeles Rams game after watching USC implode in college football on Friday night. And we wonder why L.A. isn’t a football town.

Fox and CBS can block certain games from being flexed into primetime, which was the case for the Chiefs-Bengals not being moved. That doesn’t explain why the NFL decided to showcase Jeff Saturday and Mike McCarthy instead of a much more attractive matchup between the Dolphins and the 49ers.

Per Pro Football Talk, even NBC broadcaster Mike Tirico, calling Sunday night’s game between Indianapolis and Dallas, conceded that the league made a gaffe when leaving Week 13’s slate as is.

“I think that Miami-San Francisco game at not 4:05 in a CBS doubleheader weekend, and that game on Fox doesn’t go to a lot of the country, that’s the game that for the football fan they should be seeing in that prime-time window that Sunday night,” said Tirico in conversation with Jimmy Traina on the “SI Media Podcast.” (h/t PFT)
Flex scheduling was conceived with weekends like this in mind, but the NFL dropped the ball by keeping the Colts and Cowboys in primetime.