Credit: PFTLive

The NFL appears to be chipping away at the tradition of putting most of its games on during Sundays, and that isn’t sitting well with a lot of fans.

Chris Simms, however, sees a silver lining.

An Awful Announcing analysis of the NFL schedule found that the league will air 197 Sunday afternoon games in 2026, down from 198 in 2025 and 211 in 2021, the first year of the expanded 18-week schedule. The league has steadily shifted inventory out of the traditional Sunday regional windows on CBS and Fox and into standalone packages on streaming services and weeknight broadcasts.

ESPN NFL analyst Jason Kelce recently voiced his concern over this on the New Heights podcast, saying that Sunday is the NFL’s most valuable asset, and that the league’s aggressive push into new days of the week is gradually eroding what makes it special.

“Sunday is the day of football, right? 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,” Kelce said. “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.”

On Tuesday’s episode of PFT Live, Simms offered a counterpoint, effectively explaining that when it comes to NFL Sundays, less is more.

Is it really a bad thing to have fewer games happening at 1:00 p.m. ET on a Sunday? pic.twitter.com/08hKHFcpWy

— PFT Live (@PFT_Live) May 26, 2026

“I understand what’s being said here, but I don’t really get it,” Simms said, speaking with co-host Mike Florio. “I mean, eight games sounds like music to my ears. We want 12 games on that we can’t really see any of them, so we watch what, two out of the 11 that are on?

“…I don’t want seven games at 1 p.m. I can’t watch it all. There’s no way. It’s stupid. Are you telling me people’s Sundays are gonna be ruined because they’re gone? They’re gonna get home from church and go, oh, there’s five games on at 1 p.m. instead of 7? Oh sh*t, the day’s ruined. It’s ruined.

“I mean, I hate when there’s four games at 4:25. I hate it. Or one’s at 4:05. There’s two at 4:05 and two at 4:25. I hate that. I can’t watch it. I’d like to enjoy the games.

“So I’m one that’s not going to be complaining about this. I like the standalone games. I enjoy being able to watch one at a time… There’s nothing worse to me on a Sunday when the whole slate and you go, oh my gosh, there’s 13 games today on Sunday. There’s no way I can keep track of it all and really talk about it all… I feel like this will be better for everybody to digest. And I don’t think it’s going to effectively change Sundays all that much.

Simms went as far as to say that removing some games from Sundays will make the NFL viewing experience even better.

“In fact, there’s a part of me that wants to argue and go, it’s going to make it better,” he continued. “We’re all going to be tuned into the same few games and enjoying that and be able to see it more rather than, ‘I don’t know what happened there. Hold it. He kicked a field goal. Oh, he threw a pass. I have no idea what’s going on, but I saw that play. I saw that play. I saw that play. And that’s where I wouldn’t mind seeing eight games on Sunday.”

The one thing to remember with this whole discussion is that, right now, the change in games played on Sunday is incredibly minimal. It’s not as though the NFL is taking games away wholesale. So it’s not the crisis Kelce makes it sound like, and it’s also not the panacea Simms might want it to be. Not yet, at least.

That said, there is an obvious rebuttal to Simms’s issues with the modern NFL Sunday viewing experience, but we think someone else can say it better than we can.

If only there was a channel…… https://t.co/0CKsv4MVd5

— Scott Hanson (@ScottHanson) May 26, 2026

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