NFL Goes All-In on Holidays

After weeks of amplifying buildup, the 2026 NFL regular-season schedule is now out, and so begins the jockeying for supremacy—both on and off the field. 

As planned, the league released its full schedule Thursday night, unveiling a slate that, like last year, places more games than ever in exclusive broadcast windows. Among the highlights of the 272-game regular-season schedule:

• All about the holidays: After a banner 2025 season for viewership that featured historic viewership around fall and winter holidays, the NFL is leaning into that even more this year. The league created a new Thanksgiving Eve game on Netflix with the Packers and Rams. The traditional Thanksgiving Day slate on CBS and Fox, marked by fierce divisional rivalries, will lead to an NBC nightcap with the Chiefs and Bills. Amazon’s fourth edition of the Black Friday game will feature the Broncos and Steelers. Netflix’s Christmas doubleheader, meanwhile, will include the Packers vs. the Bears and the Bills vs. the Broncos, followed by a primetime Fox holiday contest with the Rams and Seahawks that reprises last season’s NFC Championship game. 
• High-drama kickoff: NBC will begin the season on Wed., Sept. 9 with a Super Bowl LX rematch between the Patriots and Seahawks. The somewhat unexpected move brings into further focus the ongoing personal scandal involving New England head coach Mike Vrabel. 
• International intrigue: The unprecedented nine-game set of global matchups incorporates CBS, Fox, and NBC in that part of the schedule, and will likely generate historic increases in viewership for those broadcasts. 
• Road to the Super Bowl: As ESPN and parent company Disney are placing all of their weight behind coverage of Super Bowl LXI and are chasing a viewership record, the network’s Monday Night Football schedule features every 2025 playoff team, and multiple appearances by the Bills, Rams, Chiefs, Eagles, and Seahawks. 
• Mendoza watch. After selecting Indiana star and Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza with the first selection in the NFL Draft, the Raiders have no primetime appearances on their schedule. There could be later changes, however, with flex scheduling rules that will go into effect after the season starts. 

Nearly every nuance in the schedule carries massive implications as the NFL remains, by far, the most-watched programming in all of U.S. television.

Broadcast Changes

This year’s schedule follows a series of dramatic offseason moves in which the league closed a complex equity deal with ESPN and Disney, and regained four games in that transaction along with a separate broadcast previously held by YouTube. The NFL subsequently resold three of those games to Netflix, and one each to Fox and NBC. (Netflix now has five games, up from two last season.)

The end result is a heightened presence for the league in both streaming and over-the-air TV as the NFL continues its pursuit of maximum reach in a fast-changing media environment.

Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Each of the league’s rights holders, meanwhile, touted the appeal of their respective schedules. 

Amazon has every 2025 playoff team on its Thursday Night Football schedule and its lineup includes a Christmas Eve broadcast with the Texans and Eagles. CBS Sports will air the Chiefs, Bills, Patriots, and Steelers up to nine times each—triple the number on any other network. NBC Sports touted its turn with the “Rivalry of the Decade” between Chiefs and Bills. ESPN will oversee a hefty 26-game regular-season slate between MNF, a Week 18 Saturday doubleheader, and seven games on the NFL Network. Fox has the most windows of any rights holder, thanks in part to a tripleheader in Week 10. 

Within that, the race for bragging rights as the most-watched NFL window of the season will commence. 

“Our schedule is very well balanced, and we’re really excited about the amount of top quarterback matchups that we have,” Amazon Prime Video head of sports programming Jeff Kaiser tells Front Office Sports. “It’s things like Joe Burrow vs. Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes vs. Matthew Stafford, Drake Maye vs. Caleb Williams, or Sam Darnold vs. Bo Nix, and it’s a consistent theme throughout the schedule.”

Earlier in the week, NBC, Fox, Amazon, ESPN, and CBS all had releases of key games on their respective schedules. 

High-Wire Politics 

Despite the expanded role for each of the legacy networks in this year’s schedule, the increased fragmentation of the slate will likely only amplify the political and regulatory pressure on the NFL.

There are at least four different points of legislative and regulatory pressure on the NFL, including an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. While that probe is not expected to produce any charges against the NFL, many leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump have been openly critical of the league’s approach, and criticisms of the league will likely continue.

Meanwhile, the NFL has consistently argued that its commitment to broadcast television is unwavering, as shown in part by 87% of its games being broadcast on free television—a figure that rises to 100% in the competing teams’ home markets in each contest.

“To be fair, watching the NFL is more complicated than it used to be, as no single service has everything,” wrote LightShed Partners in a research note to clients. “But consumers now have real choice, and for those willing to navigate multiple apps, the savings are meaningful. It’s also worth remembering that before 2023, the only way to watch every NFL game was DirecTV with a satellite dish bolted to your house, unless you could prove one would not work at your location. Streaming has been unambiguously pro-consumer.”