NFL on American television
overview of American professional football television broadcasts
The television rights to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games in the United States are the most lucrative and expensive rights of any sport in the world. Television brought professional football into prominence in the modern era after World War II. Since then, National Football League broadcasts have become the most-watched programs on American television.
Since the 1960s, all regular season and playoff games broadcast in the United States have been aired by national television networks. Since 1998, regionally shown regular season games on Sunday afternoons have been televised on CBS and Fox, which primarily carry games of AFC and NFC teams respectively (the conference of the away team generally determines the broadcaster of an inter-conference game). Nationally televised regular season games on Sunday and Monday nights have aired on NBC and ESPN, respectively, since 2006. ABC has also aired selected ESPN-produced regular season games since 2020. In addition, a "flexible scheduling" policy allows the league to reschedule select Sunday afternoon and Sunday night games to different time slots and/or reassign them to different networks regardless of conference in the second half of the season. Since the 2023 season, select Monday night and Thursday Night games are now also subject to flexible scheduling. During the postseason, ESPN/ABC airs two or three games, NBC airs two–four games, while CBS and Fox air the rest of the AFC and NFC games, respectively. The Super Bowl is currently rotated annually among CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC/ESPN.
With games airing on CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN/ABC, the NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies (Paramount Skydance, NBCUniversal, Fox Corporation and The Walt Disney Company (majority ownership, with Hearst Communications and the league owning the remaining ownership of ESPN Inc.) that control a combined vast majority of the country's television product.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “NFL on American television” as overview of American professional football television broadcasts. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as overview of American professional football television broadcasts. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6953779. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2006, 2020 and 2023.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “NFL on American television”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow NFL on American television primary sources, NFL on American television archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “NFL on American television”?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
- Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “NFL on American television” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.