Traditionally, the NFL owned Sundays. Fans knew exactly what the rhythm looked like: packed Sunday afternoon slates, a marquee Sunday Night Football matchup, Monday Night Football to close things out, and the occasional Thursday game sprinkled in for extra drama. It was structured, familiar, and just balanced enough to keep football feeling like an event to look forward to. But now, the NFL is spreading games almost everywhere.

A quick glance at this year’s NFL schedule makes one thing clear: the slate is oddly scattered. During Christmas week alone, there are already eight standalone games. And, as it so happens, Thanksgiving week does not see much improvement either, featuring only nine Sunday games compared to seven standalone matchups. The 2026 season will even begin on a Wednesday night before shifting to a Thursday game in Australia, while the league is also introducing its first-ever Thanksgiving Eve broadcast this year. While fans immediately pointed out the overcrowding, even the league itself acknowledged that it may have done too much during its two holiday weeks in 2026.

“We’re probably stretched about as thinly as we can go that week,” NFL V.P. of broadcast planning Mike North said of the Christmas schedule, via Pro Football Talk. “Fans vote with their remotes. They’ve shown us an interest in watching NFL games on Christmas.”

Traditionally, holiday weeks still preserved the core structure of NFL Sundays. Thanksgiving usually featured the Lions’ early game, the Cowboys’ afternoon slot, and a primetime matchup at night before transitioning back into a mostly normal Sunday slate. Christmas, meanwhile, was historically treated far more lightly, sometimes featuring only one special game or none at all depending on how the calendar fell. That changed dramatically once the NFL expanded to a 17-game season and streaming platforms began aggressively pursuing exclusive holiday inventory.

The reason is simple. The NFL keeps winning in the ratings. Last season, the league averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, a 10% increase from the previous season and one of the highest averages ever recorded. It was also the second-highest regular-season average since Nielsen tracking began in 1988. With numbers like that, the NFL feels confident experimenting with the traditional schedule. Even streaming-exclusive broadcasts, once viewed as risky territory for the league, have continued drawing massive audiences in recent years, giving the NFL even more confidence to expand nationally televised windows.

Every major television package benefited from the surge. NBC’s Sunday Night Football averaged 23.5 million viewers, CBS averaged 21.25 million, ESPN and ABC’s Monday Night Football package averaged 15.8 million, while Amazon’s Thursday Night Football jumped 16% year-over-year to 15.33 million viewers. That last figure was especially important for the league because it helped validate the long-term viability of streaming-exclusive NFL broadcasts after early concerns that moving games away from traditional television would hurt viewership.

In other words, the NFL is giving its fans football almost seven days a week rather than putting all the games on just Sundays. As far as the league goes, more single games usually bring bigger audiences in both TV ratings and streaming numbers. The league has also expanded its late-season Saturday package to four weekends spanning Weeks 15 through 18, while a record nine international games are scheduled to air nationally this season. The Seattle Seahawks are even scheduled to play on six different days of the week this year, highlighting just how far the league’s calendar has drifted from its traditional Sunday-heavy structure.

Some people, however, find this quite upsetting. The games during the holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, are starting to feel overloaded with major matchups carrying playoff implications, making it difficult for teams to play the most critical games within an extremely short period. There are also concerns about compressed preparation time and uneven rest advantages as more games get pushed into standalone windows across shorter turnarounds.

Those scheduling concerns are already becoming visible across the league. The Bears enter the season with a massive +15 rest differential, one of the highest figures seen in the modern scheduling era, while teams like the Eagles and Chargers are scheduled to face four opponents coming off bye weeks. Meanwhile, the Seahawks are ending the season with back-to-back road games for a third consecutive year.

As for viewers, it significantly changes their experience of spending holidays. Football on Thanksgiving used to mean relaxing with family and enjoying dinner. Now, fans in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia may find themselves stressing through huge divisional games that could decide playoff spots.

In recent years, the league has expanded its holiday presence even further. Since the 2021 season, it has featured multiple games on Christmas Day. Black Friday has also become an NFL event, while the expansion to a 17-game season has ensured that the league can incorporate New Year’s Eve as well.

Earlier this year, at the league meetings, the National Football League expressed its intention to explore expanding to Thanksgiving Eve and, on Wednesday, announced that the Los Angeles Rams will host the Green Bay Packers on Netflix that night.

The expansion is now reaching nearly every part of the calendar. The 2026 season will begin on a Wednesday with Patriots-Seahawks before shifting to a Thursday opener from Australia. The league is also extending its late-season Saturday package across four different weekends from Weeks 15 through 18 while staging a record nine international games this year.

The scheduling quirks themselves have become a major talking point. The Seattle Seahawks will play on six different days of the week this season, something only two other NFL teams have ever done. The San Francisco 49ers are set to travel a league-record 38,105 miles while also becoming the first team in NFL history to play two non-consecutive international games in the same season. Meanwhile, the Jaguars will spend almost an entire month away from Jacksonville because of their back-to-back London games.

Other teams also landed in unusually extreme scheduling spots. The Patriots open the season against three straight division winners from the previous year, marking the first time a team has faced that kind of start since the 2019 Dolphins. The Rams are scheduled for seven primetime games, tied for the most in NFL history, while the Browns will go five weeks without leaving Cleveland because of a four-game homestand combined with their bye week.

However, the NFL executive vice president of media distribution, Hans Schroeder, defended the league’s approach, adding:

“Giving more football to NFL fans is only a good thing, I think. You look across the games and the landscape and the schedule, and certainly it’s evolved a little bit, but the bulk of the games are still on Sunday.”

There is much more to that, however. Fans are also very disappointed in the NFL’s decision to stream games, leaving them with multiple subscriptions in order to watch their team’s games.

NFL defends more games on streaming services

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of matches being pushed on platforms such as Amazon’s Prime Video, Peacock, and Netflix. For many fans, this is frustrating as it involves frequent app hopping, remembering several passwords, and having to pay for various services.

And the league does not appear interested in slowing that trend down anytime soon. Even United States President Donald Trump weighed in on the issue.

“They’re making a lot of money,” Trump said, per Ari Meirov of The 33rd Team on X. “They could make a little bit less. … You have people that live for Sunday… and then all of a sudden, they’re gonna have to pay $1,000 a game. It’s crazy. So, I’m not happy about it.”

Despite the criticism, the NFL is defending its strategy. Schroeder made it clear that the league still strongly supports its streaming partnerships.

“We love our model,” Schroeder said on Friday. “We think we have the most fan-friendly model there is of any sport or entertainment as far as distribution.”

According to league officials, 87% of NFL games still air on free broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC. Schroeder also argued that the NFL is simply adapting to changing viewing habits as more people move away from cable television.

“When we’re going onto Netflix, we’re going onto a platform that is already massively adopted and a huge number of viewers on that platform already, including a huge number of NFL fans,” Schroeder said.

And the numbers back up the league’s confidence. Netflix’s first NFL Christmas games in 2024 averaged more than 24 million viewers, becoming the most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history at the time. The following year, Lions-Vikings on Christmas drew 27.5 million viewers and over 30 million globally, reinforcing why streamers are willing to spend heavily for exclusive NFL inventory.

Still, criticism is growing around whether the NFL is slowly weakening some of its own premium products by scattering marquee games across too many standalone windows. Sunday Ticket and RedZone were once built around the chaos of packed Sunday slates, but the growing number of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, international, and streaming-exclusive broadcasts has noticeably reduced the number of meaningful Sunday afternoon games available.

Thanksgiving week is one example repeatedly pointed to by critics. By the time the Sunday slate even begins, 10 teams will already have played during the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and standalone national windows. Add Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football into the mix, and the traditional Sunday viewing experience becomes far thinner than what fans were previously paying for through products like Sunday Ticket.

That dilution is part of why some analysts believe the league may finally be approaching a saturation point. The NFL’s dominance has historically been built around the communal feeling of “football Sunday,” where the majority of the league played simultaneously and fans spent the day immersed in the sport together. The more the schedule stretches across nearly every day of the week, the more fragmented that experience becomes.

The league already saw signs of scheduling overload last season. During the 2025 Christmas slate, five of the six participating teams either missed the playoffs entirely or were already out of contention by season’s end. Thanksgiving produced a similar issue, with only one of the six teams involved eventually making the postseason. The concern for some analysts is not just viewer fatigue, but whether the NFL is creating so many national windows that the quality of those standalone games inevitably starts to dip late in the year.

Even the schedule release process itself has started drawing criticism. What was once a single-night unveiling has now turned into a prolonged rollout involving leaks, network reveals, social media teases, and staggered announcements spread across weeks. For some fans, the buildup now feels less like an event and more like an endless marketing cycle designed to maximize engagement long before the season actually begins.

Amid the controversy, it appears that the Justice Department is looking into the NFL’s television broadcast decision-making process in connection with possible antitrust violations based on the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which offers the NFL some protection during negotiations of TV deals.

The NFL’s ongoing expansion into streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime means that fans have to subscribe to several platforms just to see games. At the same time, the league continues pushing further into nearly every available television window because the business side still overwhelmingly works in its favor, even if parts of the fan experience are becoming increasingly fragmented.

Financially, the strategy is still delivering massive returns. But culturally, the league is beginning to face a question it has rarely confronted before: how much expansion is too much before the NFL risks weakening the very viewing habits that made Sundays feel special in the first place?