The Wednesday season opener might not just be a one-time thing.
NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder confirmed on a media conference call Friday that the league could open future seasons on Wednesday nights as part of its expanded partnership with Netflix. This season, the Wednesday opener was necessitated by the Australia game — with the Rams and 49ers playing in Melbourne on Friday local time and Thursday night in the United States — the league needed to shift the traditional Thursday opener up to Wednesday to fulfill its contractual obligations with NBC, which airs the first NFL game each season. But Schroeder made clear that the Wednesday-night concept has a life beyond the scheduling logistics of the 2026 season.
“I think you’ll see us certainly playing on a couple of nights, weekday nights to start the year going forward,” Schroeder said, “and Netflix will have a Week 1 game going forward as well as part of that package.”
Under Netflix’s newly extended media rights deal with the NFL through the 2029-30 season, the streamer’s annual package will include four games — a Week 1 game, a Thanksgiving Eve game, a Christmas Day game, and a Week 18 Saturday game — and Schroeder’s comments suggest the Week 1 slot will anchor a weekday night window in the future, with the league using the partnership to put NFL football at both ends of the calendar.
That is very much by design. The NFL has spent the better part of a decade colonizing new days on the sports calendar, while pushing back on the idea that spreading games across more days dilutes the product, and Schroeder’s comments on Friday were a continuation of that argument. He also pointed to flag football’s global growth and the league’s inclusion in the 2028 Olympics as evidence that the NFL’s international footprint is only going to keep expanding, which means the schedule will keep needing room to accommodate it. The more the league plays overseas, the more a flexible weeknight window at the start of the season makes sense. A Week 1 weeknight game gives the league another window to sell and Netflix a tentpole event to build its NFL identity around at the start of every season.
“One of the things we liked about Netflix,” Schroeder said, “is the opportunity to really, within their package of games, bookend the beginning of the year and the end of the year.”
Whether the league embraces a Wednesday season opener as a permanent fixture rather than a novelty remains to be seen. This year’s scheduling was also a convenient way to avoid playing on Friday of Week 1, as the league has done the past two years. Playing on Friday of Week 1 this season was not an option for the NFL because of restrictions set forth in the Sports Broadcasting Act (the league was able to do so in the past two seasons due to a quirk in the calendar). The Wednesday/Thursday start allows the league to keep two standalone windows in Week 1 without violating federal legislation.
That alone is likely enough to see the NFL continue similar scheduling into the future. The only question now is if fans will embrace the new normal.
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.