The thirteenth Sunday of the 2022 regular season includes plenty of great games. One of those games won’t be seen by much of the country.
The clash between the 8-3 Dolphins and 7-4 49ers starts at 4:05 p.m. ET, a regional FOX broadcast that will take a back seat to the 4:25 p.m. ET game between the Chiefs and Bengals on CBS.
The 49ers-Dolphins game could have been flexed, in theory, to Sunday Night Football. But that would have meant dumping the Cowboys from prime time.
Appearing on the SI Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina, NBC’s Mike Tirico acknowledged that perhaps the better move would have been to move Dolphins-49ers to prime time.
“I think for the viewers, which is what flex should be for, it should be for the people at home so you have good games in the prime-time window,” Tirico told Traina, via Sports Business Journal. “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.”
Instead, it’s Colts-Cowboys. And the Colts were 4-5-1 at the time the NFL had to make a decision as to whether a flex would happen. Even with two straight losses by Indy, a Cowboys game will generate many millions of viewers, because the Cowboys always do, no matter who they are playing. Meanwhile, a rematch of Super Bowl XIX featuring a great Miami offense and a great San Francisco defense along with plenty of other compelling storylines will be largely overlooked.
it’s one of the basic realities of a weekend chock full of great games, from Chiefs-Bengals to Titans-Eagles to Jets-Vikings to Commanders-Giants to Dolphins-49ers. It should be a great day from start to finish, regardless of whether a potentially great game between the Dolphins and 49ers won’t get the kind of platform that it perhaps deserves.
Maybe, just maybe, they’ll have a rematch in February that definitely will get a much bigger audience.
