For decades, the NFL has largely been played on Sundays, with the bulk of the games taking place on Sunday afternoon. With new television contracts, broadcast windows, streaming partners, and a never-ending pursuit of ratings, that’s changed significantly in recent years. And Jason Kelce isn’t necessarily a fan.
In recent years, more and more NFL games are now being played on days other than Sunday. It started with Monday Night Football, but now there is Thursday Night Football every week, and the league has added Saturday games toward the end of the season as well as games on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day. Additionally, the NFL season is beginning with a game on Wednesday this year.
A recent analysis from Awful Announcing found that the league will air 197 Sunday afternoon games in 2026, down from 198 in 2025 and 211 in 2021, the first year of the expanded 18-week schedule.
Obviously, the league is doing this to create more nationally-televised games, but Jason Kelce does not seem to think it’s a good idea to dillute the product too much.
During a recent episode of his New Heights podcast that he hosts with his brother, Travis Kelce, Jason Kelce spoke out a little bit against the NFL’s recent moves to play more games outside of Sunday.
“Sunday is the day of football, right?” Kelce said, via Awful Announcing. “Outside of going to church in the morning, if you’re still religious and you do that, Sunday is like where so many games happen, and that’s what you grow up, and you gear your entire week around watching football on Sunday.”
Kelce, who ironically serves as an analyst for ESPN Monday Night Countdown, worries that this will ultimately hurt the league, which has built itself on those Sunday games.
“It’s an institution at this point, the NFL playing games on Sunday,” he said. “With every day that we keep adding in there, we’re getting away from that just a little bit. And I worry that the game got big — one of the reasons it got so popular and big was because . . . it was an event. Sunday is the NFL and everybody sets their week apart to tune in to their games that are happening on Sunday, and you’re watching kind of all of them now take place across. I worry that we’re getting away from that just a little bit by building too many of this.”
It’s clear that this is all part of the league’s strategy, but we’ll have to see whether or not the NFL heed’s Kelce’s warning and moves to prioritize those Sunday games a bit more in the future.
About Dave Kelsey
Contributing author to The Comeback.