Jason Kelce, the recently retired Philadelphia Eagles center turned ESPN analyst and "New Heights" podcast co-host, used the May 25 episode of the show to argue the NFL's expansion of game-days is eroding Sunday. The league's 2026 calendar adds Friday and Saturday windows on top of the established Thursday, Sunday, and Monday slate.
"One of the reasons (the NFL) got so popular and big was because ... it was an event. Sunday is the NFL, and everybody set their week apart to tune in to their games that were happening on Sunday. With every day that we keep adding in there, we're getting away from that just a little bit."
The 2026 schedule adds at least one nationally televised Friday game in September (a Black Friday slot expanded from Amazon's 2023 experiment), a slate of Saturday afternoon games in December, and an international slate that includes the 49ers and Rams playing in Australia. The Sunday slate itself remains intact — same number of 1 p.m., 4 p.m., and 8:20 p.m. games — but the surrounding nights now host inventory that historically lived on Thursday only.
The league's revenue argument is that more game days mean more TV-rights value and more streaming subscribers — Amazon Prime Video's 2024 Black Friday game outdrew several Sunday afternoon broadcasts. Kelce's institutional argument is the inverse: the Sunday-as-event premise is what built that audience in the first place, and you cannot dilute it indefinitely without changing what the league means culturally. Netflix's "Quarterback" series, returning July 14, is part of the same push for more NFL content outside the Sunday window. The NFL has not commented on Kelce's remarks. The 2026 season opens Wednesday, September 9, with a Super Bowl LX rematch between the Seahawks and Patriots.
Source: NBC Sports · theScore
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