As the NFL begins prep work on renegotiating its rights packages with its legacy media partners, a process that may see the league nearly doubling its current haul of $10 billion per year, the league seems poised to extract even more cash from the market by way of a new holiday offering.
In a bid to grow the returns from its massive Thanksgiving slate—a big-reach blowout that was further enhanced in 2023 with the addition of an exclusive Black Friday carveout on Amazon’s Prime Video platform—the NFL is considering adding a Wednesday window at the front end of its four-game Turkey Day juggernaut.
The Thanksgiving Eve offering could be locked into the league’s schedule as soon as this coming season, which means two teams will be playing football on Wednesday, Nov. 25. While the NFL is always on the lookout for an opportunity to squeeze additional dollars from a besotted media marketplace, Wednesday historically has been viewed as a no-go zone, as only five games have been played on Hump Day over the course of the last eight decades.
The last four Wednesday games were necessitated by calendar quirks and unusual extenuating circumstances. In 2024, Christmas Day fell on a Wednesday, leaving Netflix to stream its $150 million Chiefs-Steelers/Ravens-Texans doubleheader in the dead center of the week. Four years earlier, a thrice-postponed Steelers-Ravens showdown landed on the unconventional afternoon slot as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to wreak havoc with the NFL schedule.
A Giants-Cowboys season opener was also shipped to a Wednesday in order to sidestep President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. (This was likely the smart call, as that address averaged 35.7 million viewers across 13 networks.) Prior to that accommodation, the last time an NFL game had been staged on a Wednesday was on Sept. 22, 1948.
The NFL’s inquiry into staging a Thanksgiving Eve game in 2026 was first reported by ESPN.
While a distributor has yet to be assigned, YouTube appears to be the favorite to land the new primetime pre-holiday window, for which the streamer is likely to pay in the neighborhood of $100 million. But for a primetime NBA window on ESPN, that Wednesday is a dead zone for linear TV, as the Big Four never air first-run episodes of their primetime series on the biggest travel day in the U.S.
Last year’s all-repeats fest averaged 2.16 million viewers across ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, while ESPN’s Timberwolves-Thunder telecast drew 2.43 million viewers.
The Wednesday add-on is part of a four-game slate the league assumed upon completion of its $3 billion sale of NFL Network to ESPN. YouTube, which already pays some $2 billion annually for the rights to the out-of-market NFL Sunday Ticket package, is expected to pick up all four of those windows.
The Google-owned streamer’s first standalone NFL production, a Sept. 5 Chiefs-Chargers brawl in Brazil, averaged 18.5 million viewers here in the U.S. and another 1.2 million via foreign markets.
Presumably, the prospect of raking in another nine figures should go a long way toward dispelling any fears of overloading the tryptophan-adjacent stretch of the NFL calendar. That said, one long-term media partner that’ll be monitoring the potential downstream effects of the heavying-up is NBC, which has held down the primetime Thanksgiving slot since 2006. While the massive deliveries for the early CBS/Fox games are unlikely to be jolted by the addition of a Wednesday night window, NBC’s showcase already must contend with a decline in overall television usage that occurs as millions of Americans head back home from their holiday feasts.
NBC Sports’ coverage of last season’s Bengals-Ravens game averaged 28.4 million viewers, 25.4 million of whom took in the action via the flagship broadcast network. While NBC’s Thanksgiving turnout was no slouch—Cincinnati’s 32-14 defeat of Baltimore was the 20th most-watched U.S. broadcast of 2025—the TV turnout once again lagged the out-of-home-boosted afternoon windows. CBS served up the year’s third-largest audience as the Chiefs-Cowboys game averaged a record 57.2 million viewers, while Fox’s Packers-Lions lead-in drew 47.8 million.
As much as the reverse over-the-river-and-through-the-woods dynamic puts NBC at a bit of a disadvantage, the network never fails to take the cyclical HUT level declines into consideration when it sets the ratings guarantees for its Thanksgiving advertisers. The primetime game’s reach and a whopper of an average unit cost conspire to see NBC rake in nearly $100 million in ad revenue for its holiday presentation, and since the network is careful to skirt any potential make-good issues, it effectively gets to keep all the money it generates during the game. (Throw in the estimated $65 million NBC realizes by way of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the fourth Thursday in November is always a huge earner for the network.)
Marketers are particularly keen on the prime-time window, as it offers a bridge to the consumerist orgy that is Black Friday. Last year saw Americans set a new online spending record of $11.8 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, and the five-day stretch between the feast day and Cyber Monday closed out with a staggering $44.2 billion in sales. As such, it’s little wonder that advertisers find great value in transmitting their holiday sales pitches to a captive NFL audience.
Thus far, the NFL’s expansionist tendencies haven’t proven to be a burden on fans, as evidenced by last season’s near-record ratings. The 2025 campaign was the most watched in 36 years, and while the league’s media partners enjoyed a bit of a boost care of Nielsen’s new currency and an expanded out-of-home headcount, the NFL’s ever-growing slate of windows doesn’t seem to have triggered the parabolic relationship between familiarity and contempt.
As much as relative scarcity has nearly always worked in the league’s favor, the launch of the broadcast TV Thursday Night Football package in 2014 effectively demonstrated that too much football is never enough football.