Formulating the NFL’s 272-game regular-season schedule has grown more complex as the league continues to add streaming partners, international contests and holiday features. But an underrated element to the schedule-making process is accounting for everything besides football that impacts viewership trends.
Airbnb prices, weather, local sporting events and even the economy each have some pull on an NFL fan’s likelihood to spend their Sunday (or Monday or Wednesday or Thursday for that matter) tuning into a game. And to maximize viewership, the NFL partners with Recentive Analytics to help predict the impact of even the most niche scenarios.
“Where we really try to focus all of our efforts is everything that has nothing to do with the NFL,” said Andy Tabrizi, founder of Recentive Analytics. “That may sound really strange to say when we’re talking about forecasting NFL viewership, but the reason why our model is so accurate is that we’ve really been able to figure out the NFL as a function of everything else.”
Tabrizi first started experimenting with prediction models in middle school to help him hustle his friends in fantasy football. He founded Recentive Analytics in 2013 and, four years later, began working with the NFL to forecast ticketing behavior for local clubs and marquee events like the Super Bowl.
After a few months, that partnership extended to the broadcasting department, where Tabrizi’s company helps the league forecast viewership across every TV window, broadcast channel and matchup. Recentive’s platform uses data from more than 1,200 sources and is accessed by NFL executives who can select from many factors to simulate game scenarios.
Even for the biggest football fans, Tabrizi said, tuning in to watch seven hours of football on Sunday is still just a fraction of time compared to the rest of the week. That’s why Recentive Analytics powers its model with minuscule and hyper-specific external factors.
“While some (factors) may be less than a point of impact, when you’re talking about many, many, many of them, it really does start to move the needle,” Tabrizi said. “Oftentimes, people really take a step back and realize the NFL, like everything else, is a part of my life, and it’s not the entirety of it. So as a result, we try and think about the entirety of it.”
So, what exactly does the economy have to do with NFL viewership? Tabrizi broke that one down to a friend recently.
“When times are really good, you may have some kid down the street that you’re paying a hundred bucks to mow your lawn. And as a result of that, you have a free Sunday afternoon, and thus you’re whatever percentage points more likely to watch an NFL game,” Tabrizi said. “But when things aren’t as good, and you don’t have those luxuries, and now you’re mowing the lawn yourself on Sunday afternoon, well, that’s one less possible viewer that could watch an NFL game.”
The NFL averaged 18.7 million viewers per game during the 2025 regular season, which was the second-highest since audience averages began being kept in 1988, according to the Associated Press. The league’s record-setting viewership has led to lucrative media rights deals that have expanded from traditional networks to streaming platforms like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix.
When considering everything outside the NFL bubble, some of the predictions Recentive Analytics has provided have seemed surprising at first. Take the 2020 COVID-impacted season, when some predicted NFL viewership would reach new heights as fans looked for a distraction or way to keep busy during quarantines. Recentive’s model predicted the opposite.
“Media consumption is pretty much a zero-sum game. If something is going up in viewership, it pretty much guarantees that something else is going down,” Tabrizi said. “In that period of time, whether it was because of the election or COVID or the economy, whatever it was, cable news consumption was up by several multiples.
“A lot of other things have to go down to account for that, and obviously, one of the things that’s going to go down is discretionary interests like watching sporting events.”
As it turned out, viewership for the 2020 regular season decreased 7 percent from the year prior, according to Nielsen. The 15.4 million viewer average that year was the lowest for the league since 2017.
The league refers back to Recentive’s models throughout the season and playoffs to flex games into the most optimal windows. Last season’s Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers wild-card playoff game was flexed to Saturday night on Prime Video, which caught some grumblings from fans. Traditionally, the marquee wild-card matchup has fallen into the late Sunday afternoon matchup.
However, in this scenario, Recentive’s model showed that the gravitational pull of the NFC North showdown was enough to flex it to a less-traditional TV spot.
“Through our forecast, we were able to show, ‘Hey, that game is so interesting to fans, that you’re not going to lose any meaningful audience just because you’re going from Sunday afternoon to Saturday night,’” Tabrizi said. “(The NFL is) interested in getting the biggest overall (number). So over the course of all of those games, putting that Chicago game on Saturday night, maybe (results in) a little bit of a drop-off on Sunday, but an aggregate between those two windows, the (NFL) ended up in a better place.”
The numbers followed. The Bears-Packers game was the most-streamed game in NFL history with 31.6 million viewers. Meanwhile, the San Francisco 49ers-Philadelphia Eagles game Sunday afternoon also set a record as the most-watched wild-card game on any network since 2022, with 41 million views on Fox.
Forecasts can be more important — and complicated — when predicting for new factors like broadcast channels or international destinations. Tabrizi said he has found viewership for international games is more heavily tied to game quality than matchups played during traditional timing windows.
Scarcity has also been a topic of discussion lately in NFL scheduling. The NFL has long stood out for its condensed season that prioritizes Sundays, but new streaming partners, an increased presence around Thanksgiving and Christmas and regular-season expansion have spread the calendar open. The 2026 NFL season will kick off on a Wednesday for just the second time in league history.
Tabrizi said to account for the increased cadence of games, there’s been more of a focus on setting up the season holistically. That means looking at which late-season matchups might have the most at stake versus which teams might fizzle out of the postseason picture earlier.
“There is always a tipping point with any business for anything at which point supply exceeds demand,” Tabrizi said. “I certainly don’t think the NFL is there or close to it, but the reality is, if you used to have six games on a Sunday afternoon and now you’re taking one of those games off and moving it to a Tuesday night or whatever, it has to impact what Sunday afternoon does.
“The real question is: Is the trade-off worth it because we’re still getting more incremental viewers on Tuesday? The answer so far has been yes.”
The NFL will unveil the full 2026 regular-season schedule Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. It will include a record-high nine international games and, if it matches last year, nine broadcast channels throughout the 18 weeks. And, off the field, there’s even more to consider.
“You can’t really maximize something if you’re not able to forecast; otherwise, you’re just rooted in opinions and feelings,” Tabrizi said. “What we help (the NFL) really understand is everything on the margins, the incremental value of going with option X versus option Y, and all the trade-offs in between.”