Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. At the start of every season I like to remind people about the indispensable website 506Sports. If you don’t subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, 506Sports is the easiest way to tell which NFL games are playing in your local market on Sunday. 

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In today’s SI:AM: 
🦅 Eagles’ Carter booted swiftly
🏈 One-on-one with Mahomes
🇦🇷 Messi’s tearful farewell

Get your remote ready

The start of a new NFL season means you figure out how you’re going to watch all the games. Gone are the days when you could just turn on your television and flip to one of three or four channels. This season, NFL games will air on a whopping 10 different platforms. Here’s what you need to know. 

The NFL’s YouTube debut

Friday night’s game in São Paulo between the Chiefs and Chargers will be the first NFL game streamed live on YouTube. That’s good news for fans who are sick of paying for a slew of streaming services to follow the league, but there’s one big concern: Will the stream crash?

To be clear, the game is streaming on plain old YouTube, not the paid YouTube TV service. It’ll be right there on the site next to throwback WWE clips, Russian dashcam footage, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater speedruns and whatever else you usually watch on the toilet. Airing for free on the world’s biggest video-hosting website means the potential audience for the game is virtually limitless, but there are questions about whether the platform can handle the demand. 

When Taylor Swift appeared on the New Heights podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce last month, the stream unexpectedly crashed about an hour and 45 minutes into the show’s premiere. The Swift-Kelce stream peaked at 1.3 million concurrent viewers. Last season, the NFL averaged 17.5 million viewers per game in the regular season and peaked at 38.8 million (the Giants-Cowboys game on Thanksgiving). That only includes U.S. viewers. How many people worldwide are going to watch when they can tune in for free? 

Though the audience will no doubt be enormous, YouTube has had plenty of time to prepare for this test of its servers. The game was awarded to YouTube in May, while the Swift appearance on the Kelce brothers’ show was only announced a few days in advance. Presumably, YouTube has spent the intervening months figuring out how to flip all the right switches so the broadcast runs smoothly. 

Commercials on RedZone?

The other big news as the season gets started is the looming change to NFL RedZone. Host Scott Hanson’s typical greeting for RedZone viewers has been welcoming them to “seven hours of commercial-free football” but Hanson told Pat McAfee this week that this season he’d be going with “Seven hours of RedZone football starts now.” That’s because RedZone will feature “a limited number of ads,” Richard Deitsch of The Athletic reported. Quite a limited number, in fact. Front Office Sports reported that there will be just four 15-second ads during the entire seven-hour Week 1 broadcast. That isn’t enough time for Hanson to get up and go pee. 

When RedZone does air ads, it will be as part of a “double box” setup in which the commercial plays in one box and a game plays in the other. The audio will be of the commercial. Introducing ads to a previously commercial-free environment is always annoying, but at least there will always be football on the screen. 

What’s up with the ESPN-NFL deal?

Some people were quick to blame the RedZone advertisement mini-controversy on the recently announced partnership between ESPN and the NFL. As a refresher, the two sides announced last month that the league would purchase a 10% equity stake in ESPN. In exchange, ESPN will take over control of the NFL Network and receive linear distribution rights for RedZone (but not production control), along with a few other considerations. 

But the deal still has to be approved by government regulators, and so nothing will change for this season. What do you have to know about the impending partnership in terms of the 2025 season? Nothing, really. If you get mad at ESPN for not talking about your favorite team enough, you can’t blame it on the network taking orders from the league. 

Other broadcast details of note

Most games will still air on traditional TV networks (CBS, Fox, NBC and ABC), but a few will be streaming exclusives. That includes the Thursday Night Football package on Amazon Prime Video, where Thursday games have aired since 2022, but it also includes a couple of one-offs. Netflix will again air a Christmas Day doubleheader (Cowboys-Commanders at 1 p.m. ET and Lions-Vikings at 4:30 p.m.) and NBC has made its Dec. 27 game a Peacock exclusive. The interesting thing about the Peacock game is that the matchup hasn’t been announced. NBC will get to pick from one of five games and will likely choose the one with the biggest playoff implications. 

Others Receiving Votes

ALREADY time to worry for College Football's BIGGEST programs? | Others Receiving Votes

​​Pat Forde and the SI crew dig into whether it’s already time to panic for college football’s biggest programs on the latest Others Receiving Votes podcast. The episode covers everything from Bryce Underwood’s readiness and Oklahoma’s expectations to targeting controversies, ACC scheduling shifts and Week 2 picks.

The best of Sports Illustrated

The top five…

… plays from the Eagles-Cowboys opener: 
5. Dak Prescott’s mobility in the pocket to buy enough time to find CeeDee Lamb. 
4. Miles Sanders’s patience to break a 49-yard run. 
3. Saquon Barkley’s one-handed catch, followed by a nasty stiff arm. 
2. Barkley’s powerful running on his first touchdown of the season.  
1. A perfect pass by Jalen Hurts for a 51-yard gain.


This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Your 2025 NFL Viewing Guide.