The NFL’s 2026 Thanksgiving slate is an embarrassment of riches

Syndication: Detroit Free Press

For decades, NFL Thanksgiving meant two things: the Lions hosted somebody in the early afternoon, the Cowboys hosted somebody around dusk, and if you were still upright by the time the night game kicked off, that was a bonus. It was reliable in the way that family recipes are reliable — not because anyone sat down and engineered it to be great — but because it had been done the same way so many times that the formula eventually became something resembling tradition.

That version of Thanksgiving football no longer exists, at least not in the way the league sees it.

That’s because the 2026 Thanksgiving schedule — leaked Thursday morning as part of the full slate — is the NFL telling you that no holiday window should go unmonetized. Five games across three days, touching nearly every major media partner the league has cultivated over the past half-decade. Netflix gets Wednesday night. CBS, Fox, and NBC split the Thursday tripleheader, while Amazon holds Black Friday.

Whether you find the expansion of the holiday admirable or exhausting probably depends on how much football you were already planning to watch, but the matchups this year make the question harder to answer than usual.

Start with the genuinely unprecedented. On Wednesday, Nov. 25, the Green Bay Packers will travel to SoFi Stadium to face the Los Angeles Rams in the inaugural Thanksgiving Eve game — the first NFL game played on a Wednesday in November since the Super Bowl era began — and the first Wednesday game in Packers franchise history since Sept. 28, 1938, when they faced the Chicago Cardinals in Buffalo.

Netflix, which has been steadily accumulating NFL inventory since its Christmas Day debut in 2024, locked up this new window through 2029 and will broadcast the game at 8 p.m. ET. The league didn’t have to give Netflix a marquee game for this slot — it could have offered something perfectly watchable and called it a test run — but by putting two legitimate playoff contenders in the window, it’s signaling that Thanksgiving Eve is meant to be a permanent part of the calendar.

The ongoing question with Netflix is reach, and it’s not an unfair one. The platform has shown genuine growth as a sports broadcaster, and its Lions-Vikings Christmas Day game last December was the most-streamed NFL regular season game in American history, which is a number that would have seemed impossible to say about Netflix football as recently as 2023. But it still trails traditional broadcast in total homes reached, and there will be people who sit down Wednesday night expecting to watch football and discover they don’t have a Netflix subscription, which is a problem the NFL has accepted as the cost of doing business with streaming partners.

The games are worth watching, and the out-of-home audience that gathers around holiday televisions turns even a mediocre matchup into a television phenomenon.

With the slate it has assembled for 2026, mediocre isn’t really on the table. CBS gets Bears-Lions to start the day, two teams that should be in the thick of the playoff picture come November. Fox gets the Cowboys hosting a division rival in the Eagles. And NBC will cap things off in primetime with what might be the best rivalry in the NFL right now, Bills-Chiefs. Not to mention, Prime Video’s Black Friday matchup between the Broncos and Steelers isn’t too shabby itself.

The NFL has handed its broadcast partners five games that should be able to take care of themselves, and it has done so across every platform it has cultivated, from the oldest network windows in sports television to the two streaming deals it has been building into something permanent. November will tell us whether the football lives up to the billing. But this year’s billing is as strong as it has ever been.

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