The NFL's 2026 broadcast schedule will feature 197 Sunday afternoon games, down from 198 in 2025 and 211 in 2021, the first year of the expanded 18-week schedule. The league is opening the 2026 season on a Wednesday, adding a Thanksgiving Eve game and scheduling more international matchups than in any previous season.

The league has shifted inventory out of the traditional Sunday regional windows on CBS and Fox and into standalone packages on streaming services and weeknight broadcasts. Additional national broadcasts have been carved out of games that would have otherwise aired on Sunday afternoon.

Jason Kelce, a retired NFL player and television analyst, said the move away from Sunday risks eroding what made the sport popular. "Sunday is the day of football, right? Outside of going to church in the morning, if you're still religious and you do that, Sunday is like where so many games happen, and that's what you grow up, and you gear your entire week around watching football on Sunday," he said.

Kelce also raised concerns about the league's expansion into other days of the week. "It's an institution at this point, the NFL playing games on Sunday. With every day that we keep adding in there, we're getting away from that just a little bit. And I worry that the game got big — one of the reasons it got so popular and big was because…it was an event," he said.

Hans Schroeder, the head of NFL Media, pointed to rising viewership in defending the expanded slate. "We were up 10% last year. We were our highest season, I think, since 1989. Giving more football to NFL fans is only a good thing," Schroeder said.

The schedule changes come as the league continues to expand its distribution across streaming platforms. Google pays roughly $2 billion a year for Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV, and about 2.1 million people subscribed to the package last season.