NFL Defends Shrinking Classic Sunday Games Schedule

The amount of NFL games airing on Sunday afternoons continues to shrink as we head into the 2026 season.

Fewer NFL regular season games will air on Sunday afternoons in 2026, as the league continues to spread the love to various broadcasting partners and streaming networks. We'll have several weekday games during Thanksgiving Week, Christmas Week and more in 2026. Even in Week 1, we'll have a Wednesday night game and a Thursday night game this year.

Some NFL fans don't like it.

NFL Sundays should be packed with as many games as possible, right? Well, not necessarily, according to the league.

The league will air 197 Sunday afternoon games in 2026, down from 198 in 2025 and 211 in 2021, according to Awful Announcing.

The NFL, though, is defending the move.

NFL executive defends shrinking Sunday window

NFL manager of broadcast planning and scheduling analytics Max St. John spoke on the Sports Media Watch Podcast this week.

"Definitely a concern, it's something we are always trying to be cognizant of," St. John said. "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."

However, the league believes that quantity doesn't always equal quality.

"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."

It'll be interesting to see how small the Sunday afternoon games total gets in future years.

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This story was originally published June 1, 2026 at 10:00 PM.