Five NFL teams have no national TV game in 2026

The finding

The NFL sells two different products and calls them both television. 187 of this season's 272 games — 69% — are Sunday afternoon windows on CBS or FOX. Those networks carry several games in the same slot and your local affiliate picks one, normally the nearest team. Live somewhere else and you do not get a choice; you get your own market's game instead. The other 61 are national windows: Sunday night on NBC, Monday night on ESPN or ABC, a Thursday or international game on NFL Network, and the streaming exclusives on Prime Video and Netflix. Those are the same game in all 32 markets.

So the number that decides whether you can follow a team from another state is not how good that team is. It is how many national windows it has. We counted them for all 32.

Every team, ranked by national TV windows

Fewest first. National is games the whole country sees. Market-only is Sunday CBS/FOX windows that depend on where you live. Unassigned is flex windows the league has not scheduled yet — every team has at least Week 18 open, and a few of those will become national. Services at home is how many separate subscriptions a fan living in the team's own market needs to see every assigned game.

Each team name links to its full 2026 network breakdown. Every row has its own anchor, so you can link straight to one team — #arizona-cardinals.

Why these teams end up with nothing

National windows are handed out before the season on expected audience, and the league only has 61 of them to spread across 32 teams. A team that missed the playoffs, plays in a small or shared market, or kicks off in a time zone the East Coast has stopped watching gets passed over in every one of those conversations at once. The result is not a mild disadvantage. It is a complete absence.

There is a second effect that does not show up in a ratings table. A team with no national window also never appears in the primetime promos, the schedule graphics, or the “what's on tonight” lists the rest of the league lives inside. It is missing from exactly the places a casual fan would have found it.

The teams that are simplest at home are impossible everywhere else

The table contains a real inversion. A Cardinals fan living in the market needs one subscription to see every assigned game, because the whole season sits on local CBS and FOX. A Packers fan at home needs 3 — a pay-TV bundle plus Netflix and Prime Video.

Move both fans to another state and it reverses completely. The Packers fan still sees 7 games on the services they already have. The Cardinals fan sees zero, and the only thing that changes that is NFL Sunday Ticket, sold exclusively through YouTube and priced by the season rather than the month. Being easy to watch at home and being possible to watch anywhere are not the same thing, and for these 5 teams they are opposites.

What a fan of these teams can actually do

In market: any live-TV service carrying your local CBS and FOX stations covers the entire season. Fubo carries CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, ABC, NFL Network, and NFL RedZone; which local stations you get depends on your ZIP, so it confirms them at your address during signup.

Out of market: be straight about this — no live-TV service fixes it, Fubo included. Sunday Ticket is a YouTube exclusive every competitor is barred from selling, and NFL+ carries out-of-market games on phones and tablets only, not on a television. If your team sits in the top rows of that table and you have moved away, Sunday Ticket or a small screen are the honest options.

Covers the market windows that are 69% of the schedule, in your own market. It does not include Sunday Ticket, and no live-TV service does. Free trial, cancel anytime.

Method

Every game on all 32 2026 regular-season schedules was read from ESPN's published schedule feed, captured September 13, 2026, and classified by reach rather than by delivery:

• National — the same game in every market: NBC, ESPN, ESPN/ABC, NFL Network, Prime Video, Netflix.
• Market-only — Sunday afternoon CBS and FOX windows, where the local affiliate picks the game.
• Unassigned — flex windows with no network attached yet. Counted separately and never credited to either bucket.

Broadcast-versus-cable would answer a different and useless question: NBC is free over the air and Sunday Night Football is national, while CBS is also free over the air and its Sunday window is not. Reach is the axis a viewer actually experiences.

Two honest limits. Flex scheduling moves things. 24 games league-wide have no network yet, so a team on zero can pick one up if a late game is flexed into a national slot — these are counts of windows already assigned, and the direction of travel only ever adds. A few CBS and FOX games are national by exception, Thanksgiving and the late Sunday doubleheader among them, so the out-of-market gap is marginally smaller in practice than the market-only column implies. Neither caveat moves any team off zero.

Games are de-duplicated league-wide before the 272-game totals are computed, since each one appears on two teams' schedules. The counts regenerate from the same feed the rest of this site runs on, so the table stays current as the schedule firms up.

Using this data

Questions about the method, or want this cut for one team or market? [email protected].

Frequently asked