NFL exec defends shrinking Sunday afternoon window

Since the 2026 NFL schedule dropped two weeks ago, there’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing about what’s happened to Sunday afternoon football.

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. It’s been a slow but steady erosion driven by the proliferation of international games, standalone streaming windows, and weeknight broadcasts that have balkanized inventory that once belonged exclusively to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoons. As an Awful Announcing analysis noted last month, the 2026 total is also one fewer than the number of Sunday afternoon games in 2016, when the NFL had one fewer week in the regular season.

The NFL is well aware of the trend.

Appearing on the Sports Media Watch Podcast this week, NFL manager of broadcast planning and scheduling analytics Max St. John acknowledged that preserving the health of the Sunday afternoon window remains an ongoing consideration as the league’s schedule becomes increasingly fragmented.

“Definitely a concern, it’s something we are always trying to be cognizant of,” St. John said when asked about the Sunday afternoon slate thinning in certain weeks. “You kind of get to some of those middle weeks where we’re playing an international game, and you have four to six teams on bye, yes, you do sometimes end up with a few less games than we’ve historically seen on Sunday afternoon, but that’s where you need to be strategic and deploy a Baltimore-Buffalo game at one o’clock.”

In other words, if the quantity isn’t always going to be there, the league wants to make sure the quality is. When a lighter slate does emerge, the approach is to anchor it with a game capable of commanding national attention on its own.

“Maybe we have less games at one o’clock that week, but we have a really, really big game that we can point the entire country to,” St. John continued. “So, really trying to be strategic about that.”

The NFL continues to add new windows, new partners, and new ways to watch, and every one of those additions creates another claim on inventory that once would have landed on CBS or Fox on a Sunday afternoon. Rather than fight that trend, the league’s answer, at least for now, is to be more intentional about what goes in the window when it has fewer games to fill.

“One o’clock on Sunday is really the lifeblood of the NFL,” St. John said. “That’s not something you want to forget about.”