Don’t expect the NFL to have overlapping Monday Night Football games moving forward, which has occasionally happened in recent years. According to Hans Schroeder, NFL Media’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, that era of the league is behind them.
“This speaks to another theme of how we’re always talking to our partners,” Schroeder said. “One of the things we realized with Disney collectively, when we did the deal five years ago, we thought adding two games on Monday night would
be a great thing for fans. It was more free football that was outside of a Sunday afternoon. And I think we collectively struggled and realized fans felt like they were conflicted to choose between those games.
“And so, as we worked through that and part of that transaction related to the sale of NFL Network, one of the things that surfaced was there’s a better way for us to deploy those four games.”
Per Schroeder, via Pro Football Talk’s Myles Simmons, there are currently five unassigned games that the league still needs to sell for 2026, which include some of these games that would have previously overlapped on Monday Night Football. The league is trying to make the day before Thanksgiving an event, so you’d have to think that at least one of these games would end up being broadcast then.
In other news, the NFL is no longer counting games played on Friday as “short weeks,” so teams are eligible to play two short-week games in an individual season while still being asked to play on a Friday (like a Black Friday or Christmas game).
