NFL Dominates Thanksgiving Week—and Wants Another Night

Get ready for another big helping of the NFL over the Thanksgiving holiday. 

The league is actively considering airing a game the night before the U.S. holiday during the 2026 season. If completed, the move would add to the NFL’s traditional tripleheader on Thanksgiving itself, and the Black Friday game that is also becoming a fixture of the league schedule after three years. 

The audience math around such a potential shift to Thanksgiving Eve is rather straightforward. The NFL averaged 18.7 million viewers per game last season, its best viewership in the regular season since 1989, and the Sunday afternoon windows hovered near that aggregate figure. A shift of a game to a primetime slot just before Thanksgiving, however, likely adds at least 10 million viewers to that audience figure—if not more.

Last season, the NFL also asserted its dominance over Thanksgiving weekend in unprecedented ways. The late-afternoon clash between the Chiefs and Cowboys averaged 57.2 million viewers, setting an NFL regular-season record. The three Thanksgiving games together then averaged 44.7 million viewers, the highest such figure for the holiday on record, prompting the league and networks to believe there is no ceiling to what is possible.

The Black Friday game on Amazon between the Bears and Eagles, meanwhile, averaged 16.3 million viewers, representing the most-watched sporting event on the day after Thanksgiving since at least 1991.

“Every offseason we look for new opportunities to best serve our fans in the schedule-making process,” an NFL spokesperson said. “As Commissioner Goodell has said, Thanksgiving and NFL football have become synonymous and given the continued growth of fan interest around our games on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, looking for additional opportunities tied to this special holiday is exciting for us to explore.”

More Windows in Play

Several other new game windows are also under consideration, the league said. The rights to the Thanksgiving eve game could be another nine-figure revenue opportunity for the league, based on the rights deals in place with Amazon and Netflix, respectively, for Black Friday and Christmas games. Elevated NFL rights fees have already been a heavy point of focus around the television business.

The NFL regained control of four games annually amid its complex and newly closed equity deal with ESPN parent company Disney. The league is shopping that inventory now, and that will provide an updated sense of what both linear and streaming networks are willing to pay.

The league’s viewership ambitions have also been boosted by recent changes to Nielsen’s measurement processes. Early last year, it expanded its out-of-home tabulations—a move that could be particularly impactful on Thanksgiving Eve, a big night for bars that is colloquially known as “Drinksgiving.” Nielsen also has introduced its Big Data + Panel methodology, and is separately testing an enhanced counting of co-viewing patterns.