For most of its modern history, the National Football League’s greatest business advantage was that there was never quite enough of it.
There were fewer games than in the other major professional leagues, so Sundays mattered a little more.
Monday night was special because, at first, it was rare — a standalone stage worthy of the league’s biggest games. Even the six days between Sundays served a purpose, giving anticipation time to rebuild before everyone returned to the couch.
The league has spent the past decade methodically dismantling that scarcity.
The NFL once trained its audience to organize a week around Sunday. Now it asks us to reorganize nearly every day around the NFL.
The Seahawks and Patriots kick off their season Wednesday night, and that’s not as strange as it once seemed. NFL games now occupy Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and holidays, with international kickoffs stretching the viewing day from early morning into prime time.
At the same time, broadcasts once concentrated on traditional television have splintered across Amazon, Peacock, Netflix, ESPN+ and other paid services.
The result is a paradox: The NFL has never been more available, yet following all of it has rarely required more effort — or expense.
Every additional subscription creates another barrier, particularly for younger and budget-conscious fans.
This is what domination looks like, I suppose.
It may also be what the NFL looks like near its peak.
The league remains the most powerful institution in American entertainment. Its shared national revenue reached a record $14.5 billion for the 2025 season.
Networks build programming strategies around it, and streaming companies use it to acquire subscribers. Cities, meanwhile, are still subsidizing stadiums for it. Who else is excited for the Chicago Bears of Hammond, Ind.?
Sportsbooks are monetizing practically every blade of grass between the snap and the sticks.
Yet there are hints that endless ascent is getting harder. Team distributions rose just 4.8% last season after three straight years of growth between 7.5% and 7.8%. The American Gaming Association projects Americans will legally wager $29.5 billion on the NFL through regulated sportsbooks this season, essentially flat from $29.4 billion last year.
The league may be running out of easy domestic growth.
It also remains trapped inside the central contradiction of its player-safety campaign. The NFL wants to make an inherently violent sport safer while simultaneously asking the athletes who play it to provide more games and cross more time zones.
Mature empires rarely falter because everyone suddenly stops liking or investing in them. More often, they become so confident in demand that they begin charging against it.
Streaming will produce more money. International markets contain millions of potential customers. An 18-game schedule would create enormously valuable inventory. Nearly every incentive points toward more.
The unresolved question is whether football can be everything, everywhere, all at once without becoming less special.
The NFL has gone well beyond the occasional novelty game in London. It is building an international infrastructure, with games across Europe, South America and Australia and ambitions that could eventually put every franchise overseas during a season.
Commissioner Roger Goodell said last month he has “no doubt” the NFL eventually will have teams based outside the United States.
Financially, the logic is obvious. Culturally, it is more complicated.
A league nearing saturation at home has to find new customers somewhere. But one built on local loyalties should be careful about what it takes away from the people who made it valuable.
When a season-ticket holder loses a marquee home game so the NFL can cultivate another market 5,000 miles away, globalization stops being an abstract growth strategy.
It just means someone else sitting in your seat.
Perhaps none of this matters. Perhaps the NFL has discovered what Coca-Cola and Disney learned long ago: A ubiquitous product can remain a beloved one.
Because beneath all the business-school optimization is the inconvenient fact that the football itself remains almost chemically addictive.
Which is why I spent part of the preseason on sticktothemodel.com, working through all 285 regular-season and postseason games and picking a winner in every one.
The site supplied the playoff machine, kept the standings and tiebreakers from melting my brain and built the postseason bracket. It even calculated the mathematical absurdity of the finished product. But the predictions were mine. All 285 of them.
In the AFC, Buffalo finishes 12-5 and earns the No. 1 seed. Cincinnati also goes 12-5, followed by the Chargers at 11-6 and Houston at 10-7 as the other division champions.
New England, Denver and Baltimore grab the wild cards, all at 10-7.
Which means Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City miss the postseason for a second consecutive season.
I have Joe Burrow and Cincinnati breaking Bills fans’ hearts again, upsetting Josh Allen and Buffalo in the AFC Championship Game at the brand-new Highmark Stadium.
The NFC is messier.
The Rams finish 14-3, the best record in football. Detroit goes 13-4. Dallas returns to relevance at 11-6 and wins the NFC East. New Orleans takes the NFC South at 9-8, ensuring another winter of arguing about why mediocre division champions are rewarded with home playoff games.
San Francisco also goes 13-4 but falls to the No. 5 seed behind the Rams. Seattle and Chicago finish 11-6 and claim the final two wild cards.
Philadelphia? Out at 10-7.
In the divisional round, the Niners knock off the top-seeded Rams at SoFi Stadium — a little revenge after their division rival handpicked them to open the season halfway around the planet — while Dallas wins at Detroit.
If Christian McCaffrey, Mike Evans and George Kittle remain healthy, I have trouble identifying the defense capable of consistently stopping a Kyle Shanahan offense quarterbacked by Brock Purdy in the red zone.
Not even a Rams defense featuring Aaron Donald and Myles Garrett.
That produces a seventh 49ers-Cowboys NFC Championship Game, resurrecting one of the NFL’s great postseason feuds.
The Niners survive that, too.
My Super Bowl: Cincinnati vs. San Francisco.
After 285 individual choices — and with Mahomes conveniently removed from the equation — I finally landed on the 49ers.
San Francisco wins Super Bowl LXI.
The symmetry is almost suspiciously neat: The franchise that opens its season Down Under ends it on top of the football world.
Of course, most prognosticators will probably give the Hollywood ending to the team that actually plays closer to Hollywood.
At the other end of the standings, my five worst teams form the beginning of the 2027 NFL Draft order: Miami at No. 1, followed by the Jets, Las Vegas, Arizona and Cleveland.
Stick to the Model counted 67 upsets among my selections and calculated the probability of this exact sequence at roughly one in 3.02 × 10⁶⁰.
Which may also be the approximate probability of McCaffrey, Evans and Kittle all staying healthy.
The NFL can scatter broadcasts across platforms, export games across oceans and turn every available minute into content.
But it still cannot manufacture the best part.
Nobody knows what is about to happen.
That uncertainty is why the league may be approaching its commercial ceiling while the sport itself remains culturally bulletproof.
For now, anyway.