Finishing last in your division typically doesn’t earn you a premium spot on the national TV schedule. The Detroit Lions are an exception.
Coming off a 9-8 season that ended with them watching the playoffs from home for the first time since 2022, the Lions still have eight national windows in 2026, including four primetime games. That apparent contradiction was put to NFL senior vice president of broadcasting Mike North during a conference call on Friday, and North didn’t spend much time wrestling with it.
“Look, it’s not often that a team playing the fourth-place schedule finds itself on that many television windows,” North said, “but there was no hesitation by any of our broadcast partners this year to continue to lean into the Lions. They are, I don’t know if you call them a ‘Super Bowl favorite,’ but I don’t think any of us would bat an eye thinking they’re going to be playoff relevant. Heck, everybody in that division, right? I think the whole division finished over .500 last year. No hesitation at all to find them national television windows.”
And that’s the thing, the Lions are still one of the best ratings draws in professional football, regardless of what happened in 2025. During the 2024 season — when the Lions went 15-2 and became the story of the NFL — Detroit averaged 22.6 million viewers per game across 10 national television windows, per Sportico, edging the Cowboys, who had been the league’s default ratings leader for years, by about 175,000 viewers.
The 2026 schedule reflects where the league still sees them. Detroit opens the new Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park against the Bills on Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football in Week 2, then hosts the Packers for Fox’s 4:25 p.m. Game of the Week in Week 7 and travels to Munich for the 9:30 a.m. international window against the Patriots in Week 10. From there, CBS gets them in Week 12 for a Thanksgiving Day matinee against the Bears which doubles as Ben Johnson’s second trip back to Detroit as an opposing head coach. NBC gets the Lions at Carolina for Sunday Night Football in Week 4 and at Minnesota in Week 15. ESPN gets them at home against the Giants on Monday Night Football in Week 16, and Fox closes things out with Chicago at Soldier Field in Week 17.
The Week 15, 16, and 17 windows are all subject to flex scheduling if the Lions fall out of contention, which is the league’s standard protection on late-season primetime games. Whether Detroit earns all of them is on the team, but the league’s broadcast partners have already made clear they want them there.
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.