If you watch every minute of live NFL broadcasts this regular season, you’ll be spending an average of 19.3 hours per week watching football. That number has been climbing for years, but this is a new all-time high for the league. Being a die-hard NFL fan from September through early January is essentially a part-time job.

In 2019, an NFL fanatic who wanted to watch every second of live, regular-season football would’ve spent 17.4 hours per week in front of the TV. In just five years, the NFL has taken up nearly two more hours of TV oxygen. And that’s a per-week number, so it disguises the fact that the league added a whole additional week of games in 2021. Look at the total regular season (there are an estimated 347 hours of football to watch in 2024 compared to 295 in 2019), and there is 17.4 percent more live football—on network television, on cable, and, now, on streaming platforms—to be watched today than there was pre-pandemic.

I’m calling this trend of increasing live football iNFLation (OK—we’ll keep workshopping the name). The gist is that the NFL has more football in more broadcast windows than ever before—like Friday’s Packers-Eagles game in São Paulo, which has made the league’s kickoff weekend bigger than ever. And while growth has slowed somewhat this season (I estimate there is only 0.2 percent more football to watch this season compared to 2023), the upward trend is clear: That 17.4 percent growth since 2019 represents the largest five-year increase this century.

This all raises the question: Is there too much NFL? If not, will there ever be?

Here’s what it all looks like as a graph:

Looking at this season’s schedule and making some assumptions (like that the average game lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes and you’re watching one game on television or device at a time), I’m estimating that you can watch 389 hours of football during the entire 2024 season. That represents a big jump from the 2019 season, when the total was 331 hours. That’s more than two full days of extra football to watch compared to five years ago. A decade ago you could max out at 328 hours, and a decade before that there was a paltry 283 hours of football to watch. Yeah, we’re up more than 100 hours of live football in 20 years. And again, I’m not counting any overlap. If you have Sunday Ticket or RedZone and you’re watching multiple games at once on a Sunday afternoon—something fewer people were doing decades ago—that still counts as only one window of football.

For some fans, this is great news. More football! For others, it makes the league more difficult to follow. One of the NFL’s defining characteristics is its ironclad routine. Fans have long had a reliable weekly television schedule: all day Sunday, Monday nights, and Thursday nights. There’s a scarcity to that schedule that makes each game feel like it really matters. Many fans can tune in to nearly all the football that airs in a given season, but as the schedule expands, that will become more difficult. Think about it: How many activities do you spend 19 hours per week doing?

For what it’s worth, the league is aware of this balance. “Our game is built on scarcity and the limited windows we have overall,” NFL executive vice president of club business and international and league events Peter O’Reilly said last week. “I think we do that in judicious and smart ways.” He went on to detail how the league has turned the annual Thursday night kickoff and Thanksgiving games into full-fledged events over the years—and hinted that the NFL has similar plans to make Black Friday and Christmas Day tentpole affairs. “I think when we can rally our partners and we can rally around those windows, you see some things that are really special,” he said.

Executive vice president of communications Jeff Miller added that the league is far from having any kind of viewership problems. “Ninety-four of the top 100 broadcasts last year were NFL games,” he said. “So I think that the strength of those numbers alone demonstrates that the model is healthy.”

Miller also noted that the league’s partnerships with streaming services help it reach more fans globally. “And at the same time, you know, all of our games are still free over the air broadcast to the fans in the competing team’s home market,” he added.

Still, I wanted to take a deep look at the NFL’s broadcast expansion: where and when the league is finding new slots for games and how much more time it creates for—or demands from—fans.

In researching how the NFL’s live broadcast volume has expanded, I began splitting things up into a few different groups. Everyone is familiar with Sunday football, with three traditional broadcast windows, at 1 p.m. ET, at 4 p.m. ET, and in prime time (plus the occasional early slots for international games). Similarly, every football fan is well-acquainted with Thursday and Monday night games. Saturday NFL games are more common than you may think—we usually get a solid handful of them each year starting in mid-December, and the number of games on those Saturdays has increased in recent years. (Last season, for example, the NFL delivered a triple-header on December 16, two games on December 23, and one game on December 30.) Then we get everything outside of those days—the irregular games that fall on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Fridays. Increasingly, the NFL is finding ways to fill these days with football.

Finally, I split off all the playoff football. The playoffs are kind of their own thing (and the expansion of the playoffs has also contributed to the league’s inflated slate).

Allow me to break it down, starting with the marquee day: NFL Sundays.

Sundays

The league held steady at about 160 hours of Sunday action from 2000 through 2011. But starting in the 2010s, the league began holding more international games. And in 2014, it scheduled one of those London games for a 9:30 a.m. ET kickoff—birthing a new football television window. That got us to about 170-175 hours by the end of the decade before a COVID-fueled dip in 2020. The more recent increase in Sunday hours is thanks to the expansion of the season to 17 games. Fans now have an estimated 191 hours of Sunday football to look forward to this regular season.

Mondays

The NFL has remained pretty consistent with its Monday slate. The variation is often due to quirks in the calendar (for instance, the NFL held a Monday night doubleheader on Christmas Day in 2006). For the most part, we get 55-60 hours of Monday football per season.

Thursdays

Now we’re getting somewhere interesting. Thursday football was reserved almost exclusively for Week 1 and Thanksgiving until 2006, when the league began experimenting with Thursdays as a regular window. (Remember the days when you had to have NFL Network on cable to watch it?) It wasn’t until 2012 that nearly every week of the NFL calendar featured Thursday football, and in 2014 the league sold the broadcast rights, and it has since aired on CBS, Fox, and Prime Video. This season will have 62 hours—19 stand-alone games—of football on Thursdays, the same as the prior two seasons.

Thursday Night Football has been a massive success for the league, to put it mildly. Amazon pays roughly $1 billion per year to broadcast 15 of those Thursday games (the league’s Thursday kickoff and Thanksgiving games are not included in the package).

Saturdays

Saturdays belong to college football—literally and legally. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 prevents the NFL from nationally broadcasting any of its games on Saturdays (and Fridays) from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December each year. It’s why the NFL is allowed to hold a Friday game for Week 1 this year but not every other week—this year, that Friday is the first Friday in September. Last season, the first Friday after kickoff was on September 8, the second Friday of the month. (Next year, the Friday after Labor Day is September 5, so don’t be surprised if we get another Friday tilt if this season’s game proves successful.)

It’s also why we don’t see Saturday games until deep into December. It’s not deference to college football that prevents the league from scheduling on Saturdays. It’s Congress.

The league experimented with Saturday games in the early 2000s, and all of them came in the later portion of the season. From 2000 to 2004, the league scheduled Saturday football sometime between Weeks 14 and 17. In 2005, there was a big Christmas Eve Saturday slate (this is when the NFL tried to avoid taking up too much of Christmas). But then the NFL started to pull back on Saturday games, hosting just three each in 2006 and 2007. Then 2008 saw just one Saturday game—the Ravens-Cowboys clash that served as the finale for Texas Stadium.

Saturday games started to trickle back in the mid-2010s and have exploded in the past few seasons. The 2022 season featured a large slate of Saturday games on Christmas Eve, plus two more weeks of Saturday action. Then in 2023, there were four weeks with Saturday games. And finally, you have this season, which has three weeks of Saturday games—the final three weeks of the season.

Fridays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays

Now you get into the weird, highly irregular NFL windows—and what I find most interesting about the league’s broadcast strategy for 2024.

The NFL has historically avoided playing games on Fridays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Many players have said over the years that they don’t love playing on Thursdays because of the lack of recovery and preparation time—and scheduling games on additional nontraditional days and short weeks would create huge headaches for the league. (Indeed, the league had to schedule each of the four teams playing a Wednesday game for games on the previous Saturday to make it work.) The few games the league has played on these days have historically been the result of very specific and unusual circumstances. For example, in 2004 the NFL played a Friday game only because it fell on Christmas Eve. In 2005, the NFL pushed up a game between the Chiefs and Dolphins to Friday ahead of Hurricane Wilma, though you could watch it only in the local markets. (Fun fact: the Dolphins coach for that game? Nick Saban.)

It wasn’t until 2020 that the league saw a spike in these irregular games, due to—you guessed it—COVID. Games were played on every single day of the week that season as the league grappled with COVID breakouts that forced multiple games to be delayed; the league figured moving a game to a Tuesday or a Wednesday was better than canceling. The league moved two games to Tuesdays because of COVID in 2021.

But in 2023, the NFL started to pursue these windows more as a strategy, scheduling a Black Friday game for the first time. Why can the NFL play on Black Friday if the Sports Broadcasting Act prohibits it before December? It’s because that law prohibits broadcasts only on Friday nights—after 6 p.m. Why did it take until 2023 for the NFL to realize that it could schedule a day game on the one Friday of the year most Americans have off from work? I’d speculate it’s because it figured the traditional Black Friday shopping ruled the day, and it’s only with the domination of e-commerce that it felt comfortable pushing into Black Friday (though it’s worth noting that, last year, ratings for the Black Friday game were significantly lower than expected).

Now, in 2024, we get not one Friday game but two: the previously mentioned Packers-Eagles contest that takes place this Friday, plus a Black Friday matchup between the Raiders and Chiefs.

But the most egregious change is the two Wednesday games on Christmas (Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans). Both of those games will be available exclusively on Netflix.

This is a huge shift in broadcast strategy for the league. Since 2000, the only games that have been played on Wednesday were a couple of 2020 COVID-delayed games and the 2012 season opener, which was originally scheduled for a Thursday but was moved up so as not to conflict with Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention that year. Plus, as previously noted, the NFL used to lean away from Christmas, deliberately moving most games to a Saturday in years when December 25 fell on a Sunday. Now it wants to own the holiday.

In April, Roger Goodell told Pat McAfee that the league has averaged 30 million viewers for Christmas Day over the past few years. “I don’t ask permission for that. We go where the fans are,” he said.

It all adds up to the most “irregular” football outside of 2020.

Playoffs

Finally, we have to talk playoffs. This one is simple. The hours of live postseason football have been remarkably stable—as you’d expect. But with the expansion of the postseason field from 12 to 14 teams in 2020, we now get 42 hours of playoff football when we used to get 36.

Functionally, what does this mean for the most die-hard NFL fans? It’s one thing for me to note that you’ll spend a couple of extra hours per week on average watching football—but what does that actually look like?

Compare 2024 with 2019. This year—including the playoffs now—there will be four early Sunday international games (up from two games five years ago), five Saturdays with football (up from three), two Fridays with football (up from zero), 22 Monday night games (up from 17), and 19 Thursday games (up from 17). Oh, and don’t forget the two Christmas games. Christmas also fell on a Wednesday in 2019, but the league left it football-free.

That’s simply a lot more days and times when you’ll have football to watch. More, more, more, more. But back to the original question: Is it too much?

Miller emphasized that the league makes these decisions thoughtfully. The league wants “to make sure that the future of the game is healthy and we can continue to expand the fan base as it continues to grow,” as he put it.

But it will continue to grow. Both the league and the NFL Players Association are already flirting with adding an 18th regular-season game to the calendar. That’d likely prompt the NFL to start the season earlier—possibly starting on Labor Day weekend (as the league did before 2002). In another five years, we may have a kickoff weekend with football every day from Thursday through Monday.

And why not? Miller was correct when he noted that 94 of the top 100 TV broadcasts in 2023 involved the NFL (93 were games; another was an episode of Next Level Chef that aired after the Super Bowl). In 2018, that number was “only” 61 out of 100. The NFL dominates our screens—no other pro sport has even one broadcast in the top 100.

If the NFL keeps taking up more and more of our calendar, it’s only because we keep watching.