As the NFL continues to move more games into more different time slots, the league likes to point out that it still plays most of its games on Sunday afternoon. But during Christmas week this season, that won’t be the case.
The 2026 NFL schedule features a Christmas week with eight standalone games, leaving only eight for Sunday afternoon. Thanksgiving week isn’t much different, with seven standalone games and nine on Sunday afternoon.
“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. “Fans vote with their remotes. They’ve shown us an interest in watching NFL games on Christmas.”
North noted that the Christmas Eve game this year is the usual Thursday Night Football broadcast, the league intends to keep playing three games a year on Christmas which this year is on Friday, and the league likes to play two games on Saturdays late in the season.
“This year, just the way the calendar worked, there’s also a Christmas Eve now for Amazon, there’s the three games on Christmas, two on Netflix, one on broadcast, and then you think about the two Saturdays, the Sunday night, the Monday night,” North said. “Yeah, we’re probably stretched arguably as thin as we can be for Sunday afternoon, but, you know, one of the things we liked about this schedule was the fact that I think we’re still OK for CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon. Maybe they only have four games each, or something like that, but we’re still gonna be able to make a half-decent map out of the 1 o’clock window. We’ve still got a game at 4:25 that should have playoff implications, and the single-header network is gonna be able to cover the country with their four games, so, yeah, we might be stretched about as thinly as we could be on those weeks, but we still feel like checking the box and meeting the needs of the fans on Sunday afternoon.”
Realistically, depending on how the season plays out, we’re guaranteed either to get some dud games during those standalone windows Thanksgiving and Christmas week, or else a lot of dud games on Sunday afternoon those weeks. But the NFL has made it clear that’s the direction it’s going in with its schedule, and more games are shifting into more exclusive windows, with fewer games left for Sunday afternoon.
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