Jason Kelce thinks the NFL is slowly chipping away at what made it the most popular sports league in America.
On his New Heights podcast, the retired Philadelphia Eagles center and ESPN Monday Night Countdown analyst made the case that Sunday is the NFL’s most valuable asset, and that the league’s aggressive push into new days of the week is gradually eroding what makes it special.
“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,” Kelce said. “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. Sunday is the NFL and everybody sets their week apart to tune in to their games that are happening on Sunday, and you’re watching kind of all of them now take place across. I worry that we’re getting away from that just a little bit by building too many of this.”
An Awful Announcing analysis of the NFL schedule found that the league will air 197 Sunday afternoon games in 2026, down from 198 in 2025 and 211 in 2021, the first year of the expanded 18-week schedule. The league has steadily shifted inventory out of the traditional Sunday regional windows on CBS and Fox and into standalone packages on streaming services and weeknight broadcasts.
The league is kicking off the 2026 season on Wednesday, adding a Thanksgiving Eve game, playing more international games than ever before, and carving out additional national broadcasts of games that would otherwise have aired on Sunday afternoon. And so when Hans Schroeder was asked on a recent conference call whether adding games on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday was jeopardizing the scarcity that made the NFL so popular in the first place, the NFL Media head pointed straight to the numbers.
“We go back to looking at data and looking at the information that can make us smarter,” Schroeder said. “We were up 10% last year. We were our highest season, I think, since 1989. Every one of our partners was up. Giving more football to NFL fans is only a good thing.”
The viewership data backs him up — for now. But as AA’s Drew Lerner noted earlier this week, the league’s strategy carries a less visible cost. Google pays roughly $2 billion a year for Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV, and the more games the NFL moves into standalone windows, the fewer games end up on Sunday afternoon, and the less reason fans have to buy it. Only about 2.1 million people subscribed last season, per Sports Business Journal. The diehards will probably keep paying regardless of how many games migrate to Wednesday nights and Black Fridays. But the Sunday window fans grew up building their weeks around keeps getting smaller, and the league keeps moving in one direction on that.
Kelce isn’t arguing the NFL is broken as much as he’s arguing that Sunday is still the product, and that every new window the league opens is a small withdrawal from the account that built it. The ratings haven’t proven him right yet, but the schedule keeps moving in that direction, and at some point, the league will find out whether Schroeder’s data tells the whole story.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.