Late Season Slate Shows How Badly Monday Night Football Needs Flex Scheduling

ESPN's marquee time slot won't have a game between two winning teams until Week 17

 Amazon Prime’s poor quality Thursday Night Football matchups have been the talk of this season. A look at the prime time schedules through the rest of the season, though, shows that ESPN and Monday Night Football are in for the roughest finish.

Unlike Thursday Night Football, which will never have flex scheduling, MNF gets flex scheduling beginning next season, so this is the last year that ESPN is saddled with useless matchups down the stretch after the playoff picture becomes clear.

Monday Night Football won’t have a game between two winning teams until Week 17, its final game of the season, when it airs Bills at Bengals. ESPN doesn’t air a Week 18 game. Here’s how the MNF schedule looks the rest of the way:

Week 14: Patriots (6-6) at Cardinals (4-8)

Week 15: Rams (4-9) at Packers (5-8)

Week 16: Chargers (6-6) at Colts (4-8-1)

Week 17: Bills (9-3) at Bengals (8-4)

The last two Monday night games have featured Saints (4-8) at Bucs (5-6) in Week 13 and Steelers at Colts in Week 12.

With the NFL taking care of NBC and Sunday Night Football and the coveted 4:25 pm national slot on Sunday afternoons split by CBS and Fox, ESPN may not always get a great game for Monday night, but what they do get will be an improvement over their current options, and that’s all fans care about.

ESPN’s move to lure Joe Buck and Troy Aikman away from Fox to call Monday Night Football got a ton of attention. However, the addition of flex scheduling to MNF in 2023 was ESPN’s biggest acquisition.