While the NFL frequently promotes its on-field competitive balance, there are clearly groups of haves and have-nots when it comes to the schedule and placement in top broadcast windows.
The 2026 regular-season schedule, released Thursday night, makes that split starkly clear. The Rams tied a league record with seven primetime appearances on their upcoming slate, including the NFL’s forthcoming game in Australia, a newly created Thanksgiving Eve contest, and a Christmas night clash against top NFC West divisional rival Seattle.
The team is already leaning into the heightened national attention as it seeks to again play a Super Bowl in their home venue with SoFi Stadium hosting Super Bowl LXI in February 2027.
The Bills, Chiefs, Packers, and Seahawks each are closely following with six primetime slots, while five more teams including the Cowboys have five each.
At the other end of the scale, however, are five teams with zero scheduled primetime appearances: the Cardinals, Dolphins, Jets, Raiders, and Titans. Similar trends are also in place for the late Sunday afternoon windows on CBS and Fox, which are often the league’s most-watched slots each year.
The NFL is obviously in the business of maximizing its viewership, and has even loftier goals this year after posting a 36-year audience high in 2025. That means the choices for those showcase broadcast slots will not be evenly spread, and will undoubtedly favor marquee teams and those with recent playoff pedigrees. The group of five teams left out of primetime, meanwhile, included four with 3–14 records last year, a fifth with a 7–10 mark, and four new coaches among them this year.
In years past, the NFL had an unofficial rule that each team would have at least one primetime appearance each season, but that’s faded in recent years—particularly after the current rights deals that began in 2021. League officials, however, pointed to the NFL’s flex scheduling provisions that begin with Week 5 of the regular season as key opportunities for change should those left-out teams play surprisingly well.
“Relative to a team like the Jets or the Cardinals, or the Titans, that’s what flexible scheduling is for,” said NFL VP of broadcast planning Mike North. “It’s why we put it in, why we work with our partners every year to ensure that the teams that have played their way into bigger television windows have an opportunity to be rewarded.”
The Raiders’ omission from the primetime schedule was particularly surprising after the team drafted Indiana star and Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza with the first pick of the draft. But North was quick to point out that the Titans were also not part of the 2025 primetime schedule after drafting Cam Ward with last year’s top selection.
“We don’t draft our way into primetime. We play our way into primetime,” North said.
Sunday Afternoon Considerations
League officials, meanwhile, still touted the importance of its core 1 p.m. ET and 4 p.m. ET windows on CBS and Fox, and its belief in both NFL RedZone and NFL Sunday Ticket. That stance has remained, despite the continued creation of additional broadcast windows and an embrace of streamers elsewhere that has sparked increased government scrutiny.
The 2026 schedule will feature 197 total games in the 272-game league schedule in those two afternoon slots, one fewer than last year. The creation of additional standalone windows across the league’s slate, including the new slot on Thanksgiving Eve, owes heavily to the removal of Monday Night Football doubleheaders in the league’s equity deal with ESPN.
“When we go back and look at our model, our belief in broadcast and in our model, we’re up 10% [in viewership] across all our packages last year. Every partner was up,” said NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder in response to a Front Office Sports question on a conference call hosted by league officials. “But then we had our highest number of Sunday Ticket subscriptions ever and we also had our highest viewed year of RedZone ever. All of those data points tell us that, overall, the model is working.”
Quarterback Questions
Despite all the science and precision that go into the construction of the NFL schedule, there’s still some guesswork involved, as the league doesn’t yet know the status of two top quarterbacks and viewership draws: Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers.
Mahomes is recovering from a torn knee ligament, with a promising prognosis for return in 2026. Rodgers, meanwhile, remains a free agent as he considers coming back to play at age 42, particularly with the Steelers.
Amid that uncertainty, the Chiefs have their six primetime appearances on the schedule, as well as three other late-afternoon national slots on CBS, while the Steelers will be on primetime four times.
“The Chiefs are an incredible story,” Schroeder said. “They’re one of the most popular teams in the league right now, they have been on an incredibly successful run. … and interest in the Chiefs is as high as it’s ever been.”
