NFL Schedule Release Timing Remains a Mystery as Ad Upfronts Loom

(Design by Grace Hughes, Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images))

In a perfect world, the NFL will release its 2026-27 schedule on or before May 11, when NBCUniversal and Fox are set to present their fall TV slates to advertisers and media buyers during their upfront presentations in New York.

But as the world never tires of reminding us, nothing about it can be characterized as “perfect,” and there’s a chance that the six members of the league’s TV-planning team won’t have a final breakdown of the coming season available in time for the network’s big dog-and-pony shows.

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While the NFL effectively targeted next week as go-time for its schedule release, league VP of broadcast planning Mike North said he has no idea as to when the TV/streaming roster will be loosed into the wild. Speaking on the It’s Always Gameday in Buffalo podcast last month, North told hosts Sal Capaccio and Matt Bove that fans (and the NFL’s media partners) may have to wait a little longer than usual for their first dive into the fall schedule.

“I don’t think it’s coming out in June, but the second week in May has been our target the last few years,” North said. “But I don’t think it’s impossible to think about the third week in May.”

Of course, if the schedule isn’t available next week, the NFL partners that still stage traditional upfront presentations (which is to say, every network other than CBS) won’t be able to highlight some of the must-see matchups for September and beyond. From a transactional standpoint, the lack of specifics won’t be a deterrent to advertisers—after all, the last time anyone wrote a check at an upfront after-party was probably in May 2009, following ABC’s well-received screening of the full Modern Family pilot—but the networks obviously would enjoy having the opportunity to talk up some marquee events.

In other words, while Fox would love to be able to crow about who the Cowboys will host on Thanksgiving Day, a little mystery surrounding that matchup isn’t going to cast a pall on the network’s Monday afternoon pitch. (Dallas could play the Cardinals and still draw over 55 million holiday viewers—which isn’t to say that the NFL plans to burn off one of its top TV windows with a team that went 3-14 last year. The push to include Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in last year’s Tryptophan Bowl helped CBS reach a record 57.2 million viewers.)

The networks next week may not be in a position next week to confirm that their top requests were honored by the league—since the Mahomes-Josh Allen rivalry launched in 2020, the big ask has been the annual Chiefs-Bills showdown, with CBS landing that barnburner in each of the last four years—but specificity isn’t necessarily paramount. For one thing, thanks to multiyear advertising commitments, about 40% of the in-game inventory is already spoken for when the upfront shows take place.

By mid-June, if not well before, 85% to 90% of the NFL ad slots have been booked, with the networks actively holding back a small chunk of inventory proportionate to how strong the sales bosses think the fall scatter market will play out. Nine years out of 10, scatter favors the sellers, and a last-minute bid for a 30-second spot that went for $850,000 in the upfront bazaar can now cost laggards in the neighborhood of $1,250,000.

While North did not say why there may be a holdup this year, the negotiations over the NFL’s new five-game carveout are a likely culprit. As North noted, the package—which includes three games that otherwise would have aired as the second frames of the now defunct Monday Night Football “side-by-side” doubleheaders, an ESPN+ exclusive and an international date—is still being hashed out. Careful to avoid letting the proverbial cat out of the sack, North judiciously mentioned the two streamers that are vying for the fiver (YouTube and Amazon’s Prime Video) before tossing Netflix into the conversational mix.

North didn’t explicitly confirm that the carveout would land at a streamer, but: Sure, it will. In a bid to underscore how much of a glow-up this will be, the scheduler acknowledged the services’ relative ubiquity. *“*Everybody gets their paper towels from Amazon, everybody watches Netflix and everybody can access YouTube for free, like they did last year with that Brazil game,” North said.

The new package will almost certainly include the Sept. 11 Rams-49ers game from Melbourne, Australia, and North said that all five games will be staged in standalone national windows. He added that the NFL is still looking at developing an exclusive window for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day, a new wrinkle that would also be bundled into the streaming package. “There are a lot of places that we want to deploy that inventory,” he said.

North gave fans a bit of a peek behind the curtain, saying that the process officially enters endgame when the six staffers on the scheduling committee head on up to Roger Goodell’s office to present the 2026-27 slate for his approval. “[The schedule] doesn’t get finalized until the commissioner of the National Football League says it’s finalized,” North said. “That’s why I’m being cagey about the date. I don’t know the date. None of us know the date yet because we don’t know when we’re going to walk into the boss’ office and present him one. And he’s going to say: ‘That’s perfect. Ready to go. Send it out to the world.’”

The thumbs-up from the commissioner starts the clock on the greater release strategy, with the teams getting 24 hours advance notice—giving them ample time to blast out their social media executions … and to begin the process of managing all the particulars related to ticketing. “Once he says ‘go,’ we lock it in,” North said. “The first thing we do is turn off the computers because I don’t want to find a better schedule after the commish has already blessed the winner.”

On the morning of the official release, the NFL pings copies of the slate to its broadcast partners.

If there’s no telling when exactly the schedule will arrive, the NFL has never reached the midway point of May without having issued a puff of white smoke from 345 Park Ave. “If we walk in there on May 11 or 12, and he’s not happy with where we are, he’ll send us back downstairs and we’ll lock ourselves back in the room and we’ll keep grinding until we find something he likes,” North said. “And if it slides to the 18th or 19th or 20th, you know, the world will keep spinning.”

Still, the networks are hoping that they have something substantial to talk up during next week’s upfront pitches. YouTube is anxious to receive confirmation that it has persevered in its quest for the new five-game slate ahead of its May 13 “Brandcast” presentation, although precedent suggests that the Google-owned platform may be furiously revising its run-of-show right before the curtain goes up next Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Last year, YouTube didn’t get word that it had scored the NFL’s Rio game until just a few hours before showtime.

For all that, the smart money says the NFL will figure out a way to crank out another banger in time for next week’s upfront frenzy. “I’m sure at some point [Goodell] is going to say, ‘All right, well, you morons, I’m not giving you any more time—we gotta go,’” North joked. “I hope it doesn’t get to that point.”

NBCU kicks off the upfronts Monday at 10:30 a.m. ET from Radio City Music Hall, with Fox presenting at 4 p.m. ET the same day at New York City Center. Disney returns to the Javits Center Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET, while Netflix and YouTube are set to finish out the week on May 13.

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