While the nation as a whole is seemingly sick and tired of having the Kelces on their screens at every waking moment, older brother Jason managed to cut through the noise over the holiday weekend with a rant that struck quite a chord on social media.
During a recent episode of his New Heights podcast alongside Travis, the former Eagles center-turned-do-it-all sports commentator made his feelings on the lack of Sunday football on the 2026 schedule clear while speaking about the upcoming NFL season.
“Sunday is the day of football,” Kelce began. “Outside of going to church in the morning, if you’re still religious and you do that, Sunday is like where so many games happen and that’s what you grow up, and you gear your entire week around watching football on Sunday. It’s an institution at this point, the NFL playing games on Sunday.”
“With every day that we keep adding in there, we’re getting away from that just a little bit,” he continued. “I think the game got big, one of the reasons it got so popular and big was because it was an event: Sunday is the NFL. And everybody set their week apart to tune into games that were happening on Sunday. … I worry that we’re getting away from that just a little bit by building too many of this.”
He certainly has a point. For further context, the 2026 season is set to begin on a Wednesday and will feature a prime-time and standalone schedule unlike anything the league has seen before. Not only will the NFL’s record nine-game international slate begin in Week 1 with a Thursday matchup in Melbourne between the Rams and 49ers—before transitioning into a Thursday Night Football schedule that will run through Week 17—but the league will also stage its first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game while continuing its recent holiday expansion with games on Black Friday and Christmas Day, which falls on a Friday this year. On top of that, Weeks 15 through 18 will all include Saturday matchups, with Monday Night Football slated to run from Week 1 through 17.
Needless to say, there’s not a ton of room for Sunday football anymore.
If it isn’t obvious as to why the league continues to make this shift, look no further than Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer discussing the NFL’s recent decision to strip teams’s right to protect specific home games from being moved internationally.
“We’ve seen it over the years, right? They went from only allowing teams to play one Thursday night game per year to two,” said Breer on a recent appearance on the Dan Patrick Show. “Now they can go and play a third game on a Friday night, which doesn’t count as a Thursday night. You don’t have to have a bye-week anymore—In fact, I think more teams than not don’t have a bye-week after their international trips this year … So they’ve sort of removed all of these different things, and I think the obvious reason why goes back to wanting to satisfy all of the partners who they’re hoping will bid at a very, very high level over the next few years to either keep or get those [broadcasting rights] packages.”
Money talks, sure. But at what point is enough enough? Part of what has made the NFL so popular in the first place was the sanctity of Sundays. Now, while selling these standalone rights to various streamers, the league is diluting the product across the week and—by putting these prime-time games on a proverbial pedestal—making its once-special slate of games feel far less sacred.
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