The \u201cMonday Night Football\u201d doubleheader is officially a thing of the past.<\/p>\n
At the NFL\u2019s annual league meetings Tuesday, NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder said the league will return to broadcasting one game on Monday nights to put a bow on the NFL week. In recent years, the NFL has experimented with airing two games on Monday night. Sometimes the games would be staggered three hours apart, but there were weeks the two Monday night games would air concurrently.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we did the deal (with Disney) five years ago, we thought adding two games on Monday night would be a great thing for fans,\u201d Schroeder said. \u201cIt was more free football that was sort of outside of a Sunday afternoon. I think we collectively struggled and realized that fans felt that they were conflicted to choose between those games.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the most part, Monday night doubleheaders were reserved for earlier in the season. Last year, there were two Monday night games in Week 2, Week 4, Week 6 and Week 7, as well as a \u201cMonday Night Football\u201d doubleheader to conclude the regular season in Week 18. The NFL tried to cater to the audiences in certain situations, such as last year\u2019s Week 2 doubleheader featuring teams from an Eastern time zone and a Central time zone on the front end, with two Pacific time zone teams in the later slot.<\/p>\n
Still, given the NFL\u2019s national appeal, particularly in prime-time slots, the results from fans indicated there wasn\u2019t the bandwidth for a Monday night doubleheader to maintain the viewership the league had come to expect. Schroeder said the allocation of the games that would have been part of the doubleheaders is still being determined by the league as the schedule shapes up ahead of the usual mid-May schedule release.<\/p>\n
Pulling back on the Monday night doubleheader is not indicative of the NFL\u2019s wider strategy. In fact, the league said it will continue to explore putting games in unconventional slots, such as a season opener on a Wednesday night instead of the typical Thursday. After adding games on Black Friday, the NFL will continue to try to control Thanksgiving week, potentially adding a game on Thanksgiving Eve this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we look at the calendar, and look at other natural nights that could serve our fans and deliver unique-sized audiences, that\u2019s a night that jumps out to us,\u201d Schroeder said. \u201cThanksgiving is about football, family, friends increasingly, and we think we\u2019re a big part of that. You saw that last year with some of the numbers on Thursday, and really throughout the year. Great numbers on Black Friday, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think this is the natural way to continue to grow things but we\u2019re going to look, and like I said earlier, we want to hear what the market thinks about it. There are obviously a number of different options and ways and pieces, ways the puzzle could come together. But we think that\u2019s a super interesting one, as far as an opportunity for this season.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2026 NFL schedule will feature a game played on every day of the week except Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cMonday Night Football\u201d doubleheader is officially a thing of the past. At the NFL\u2019s annual league meetings…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,6,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-847815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-nfl","10":"tag-sports-business"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}