The NFL has never been more available, and Joe Theismann isn’t entirely sure that’s the same thing as being better.
The former Washington quarterback won a Super Bowl in January 1983, at a time when the NFL was appointment television by default rather than by design. The former Washington quarterback won a Super Bowl in January 1983, at a time when the NFL was appointment television by default rather than by design. There were no streaming packages to subscribe to, no exclusive windows to track down, no playoff games sitting behind a paywall. You watched on Sunday because ABC, NBC, and CBS were your only options — aside from Monday Night Football — and the whole country more or less watched together.
Theismann spoke with Fox News Digital this week ahead of his appearance at the American Century Championship golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, and the conversation turned to what the NFL looks like now compared to the one he played in. The 2026 season opens on a Wednesday, the product of a schedule so thoroughly colonized by streaming partners and holiday windows that the league has essentially run out of traditional real estate. The NFL now plays nearly every day of the week, and Theismann thinks the Sunday that anchored it for decades has paid a price for that expansion.
“They’ve drifted away from tradition,” Theismann said. “It used to be ABC, NBC, and CBS. Now we’re in a time and a place where the opportunity for the owners to make lots of money from different entities, from YouTube, from Amazon, from Peacock.”
An Awful Announcing analysis of the 2026 NFL schedule found that the league will air 197 Sunday afternoon games this season, down from 211 in 2021 and fewer than it did in 2016, when the regular season was a week shorter. The standalone window count has climbed, from 15 last year to 23 this season. Netflix expanded its package from two exclusive games to five. Between that, Prime Video’s Black Friday game, NFL Network’s seven exclusive telecasts, and Peacock’s standalone, only nine of those 23 windows are available over-the-air to a national audience.
For better or worse, the proliferation of platforms means fans can find games that would have been lost to regional blackouts in an earlier era, and the NFL’s ratings have proven durable enough through the streaming transition that the league has little incentive to reconsider any of it.
“It gives you a chance to find the game that you want to watch now,” Theismann said. “You don’t have to read about it the next day. So, in one regard, it’s grown the NFL, and the other side of it, yeah, would we all like things to be a little bit like they used to be? Maybe. But I believe in the progressive as a progressive individual, but life is changing. You have to adapt and change with it.”
The accessibility argument only goes so far, though,
“Sunday is something you would look forward to sitting down to because you really didn’t have an option,” Theismann continued. “Now you have options on Monday night, Thursday night, Wednesday night. God only knows, Tuesday night, Saturday evening.”
Monday Night Football has been part of the league since 1970, so the NFL has never been a strictly Sunday operation. But a league that plays on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with games in Melbourne and a new holiday slot added every year, has made a pretty deliberate choice about what tradition is still worth protecting.
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.