NFL Slices Up Sunday Schedule

Afternoon Edition

May 12, 2026

The NFL keeps adding more standalone games across its soon-to-be-announced schedule, but those extra windows are coming at the expense of traditional Sunday afternoon football. The shift is gradually shrinking the beloved witching hour and changing the experience for fans who grew up watching packed Sunday slates.

—Ryan Glasspiegel

First Up

The WNBA’s officiating crackdown is already drawing complaints after a spike in fouls and free throws to start the season. Read the story.
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Fanatics landed FIFA’s World Cup collectibles rights, ending Panini’s long run and deepening its grip on the sports card business. Read the story.
The NCAA has warned baseball coaches about canceling games to improve their tournament metrics as postseason selection nears. Read the story.

NFL Schedule Tweaks Continue Erosion of Sunday’s Witching Hour

Journal Sentinel

There has been a gradual erosion of the Sunday afternoon NFL slate—and thus, the beloved witching hour—that will continue this season when at least two games from there are moved into standalone windows.

Fox is adding three standalone windows this season: one game in Munich featuring the Lions, a Christmas game, and another late-season Saturday game. Two of these games come from the league’s slate of five games it picked up to resell in the NFL Network–ESPN transaction, and another is coming out of Fox’s Sunday afternoon inventory. CBS is also adding a late-season Saturday game that is getting rearranged from its own Sunday afternoon slate.

Years ago, legendary former WFAN host Mike Francesa credited Brent Musburger for coining the phrase “witching hour” during their time working on CBS’s NFL Today studio show, where Musburger hosted and Francesa was behind the scenes. “So many of those games will turn and twist and turn and change,” Francesa said, referring to the window between 3 p.m. ET and the end of the early slate when “all hell was gonna break loose.” NFL Red Zone host Scott Hanson has adopted the phrase himself, announcing the witching hour every week.

For the past 20 years, the NFL has been chipping away at the depth of the Fox, CBS, and Sunday Ticket packages (previously sold by DirecTV, now by YouTube TV), with the addition of more standalone games derived from the afternoon slate. As a result, the witching hour’s inventory has been reduced.

While Fox and CBS are benefiting this time around from the schedule shift because they are adding their own extra NFL windows, they have collectively relinquished more than two dozen of these Sunday afternoon games over the course of the full season as the league has adapted its schedule.

It began when the NFL added an eight-game Thursday Night Football package in 2006. The weekly showcase expanded to 13 games in 2012 and eventually to a full season in 2014. International games have also played a role in this trend. There will be nine this year, from locations including London, Munich, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Melbourne. There are also more holiday windows—a Christmas tripleheader, a third Thanksgiving game, a Thanksgiving Eve matchup—in addition to the aforementioned expanded late-season Saturday slate.

The inventory has to come from somewhere. While some of it has been resold out of packages that had already been carved out from Sunday afternoon, that’s ultimately where these new windows have been created over the span of two decades.

Sports Illustrated writer Jimmy Traina summed up the trade-off after news of the CBS rearrangement was announced Monday. “I’m torn. Sunday at 1pm has been destroyed, which isn’t fun when you pay 8 billion dollars for Sunday Ticket, but I love as many standalone prime time games as possible,” Traina wrote on X/Twitter.

NFL spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the scheduling strategy.

The New Era of Sports Media

The sports media landscape has rapidly evolved, with live sports packages going to streamers, on-air talent creating their own empires, and women’s sports surging.

The biggest names at the center of it all will be in the room for our third year of Tuned In, presented by Elevate, on Oct. 13 at The Times Center in Manhattan.

Last year’s event featured big league commissioners like Adam Silver and Rob Manfred, network heads like Jimmy Pitaro and Eric Shanks, and on-air talent like Maria Taylor, Stephen A. Smith, and Greg Olsen for candid, newsmaking conversations in New York City.

ONE BIG FIG

The TV Push

Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

272

That’s the total number of NFL regular-season games, and the league is creating more standalone national windows out of that inventory. Legacy networks Fox, NBC, and CBS all picked up additional exclusive broadcasts this week as part of the NFL’s ongoing schedule rollout.

The moves also arrive as the league faces mounting scrutiny in Washington, D.C., over its growing embrace of streaming platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon. By giving the legacy networks more inventory and visibility, the NFL appears to be reinforcing its longstanding argument that broadcast TV remains central to its media strategy. Read the story.

LOUD AND CLEAR

Saw It Coming

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“It just feels like the rug was pulled from under their feet and everyone was sort of blindsided by it.”

—Rory McIlroy on the rumors surrounding the Saudi PIF’s decision to stop funding LIV Golf. McIlroy said Tuesday that talk about LIV’s funding troubles had been floating around for weeks before the news became public, while many LIV players didn’t seem to realize what was coming until the story surfaced in April.

The comments came as LIV searches for new investors following the PIF’s withdrawal. McIlroy also revisited his past support for a PGA Tour partnership with the Saudis, saying, “I can admit when I’m wrong, and that was one that I did get wrong.” Read the story.

STATUS REPORT

One Up, Two Down, One Push

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Ole Miss ⬇ The Rebels are drawing unwanted attention following comments made by former Ole Miss head football coach Lane Kiffin and Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian. Kiffin, currently LSU’s head coach, told Vanity Fair that many top recruits didn’t want to come play for him while at Ole Miss in a way that doesn’t happen at LSU, in part because the latter school’s college town has greater racial diversity. The next day, Sarkisian said Texas had significantly higher academic standards than Ole Miss, where “all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”

PWHL playoffs ⬇ The series-deciding Game 5 semifinal between the Montreal Victoire and Minnesota Frost was canceled Monday just three hours before the puck drop due to “player safety concerns related to illness,” as multiple Victoire players reportedly fell sick. The league said their symptoms were “not consistent with hantavirus.” The game has been rescheduled to Tuesday night in Montreal, falling at the same time as the Montreal Canadiens’ home playoff game against the Buffalo Sabres.

Luka Dončić ⬆⬇ The Lakers guard, who missed Los Angeles’s entire postseason run after sustaining an injury on April 2, announced on Instagram that he would not represent the Slovenian national team during FIBA World Cup qualifiers this summer to spend time with his two daughters. Dončić is trying to earn joint custody of his daughters, after he revealed his separation from his fiancée, Anamaria Goltes, in March amid a disagreement over bringing their kids from Slovenia to the U.S.

Rafael Jodar ⬆ The 19-year-old Spaniard defeated American Learner Tien in the Italian Open quarterfinals, becoming the second teenager to reach the quarterfinals of both the Italian Open and Madrid Open in one season (two of the three ATP 1000 events on clay) after Rafael Nadal in 2005. Jodar, now ranked a career-high world No. 29, joins a group of teenage phenoms in men’s tennis this past year, including Tien and Joao Fonseca.