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.
