There’s no such thing as too much of a good lead-in when it comes to NBC and Sunday Night Football.
According to LateNighter’s Jed Rosenzweig, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon will air four special Sunday episodes this season. The first installment arrives Sept. 27, on the heels of Rams-Broncos, with Sylvester Stallone and Luke Bryan already booked and additional guests still being finalized. Three further specials round out the slate: Nov. 8, following Buccaneers-Bears; Nov. 15, following Steelers-Bengals; and Jan. 10, capping the league’s regular season with Game 272.
NBC ran the same four-special format last season, and it worked about as well as it could have. Every episode from that run landed among The Tonight Show’s 10 highest-rated broadcasts of the year. The Oct. 26 special alone, which followed Packers-Steelers and didn’t even start until 12:31 a.m. ET, still pulled 1.8 million total viewers and 573,000 adults 18-49, numbers that came in 66% and 247% above the show’s season averages in those categories, respectively.
Fallon aired five post-Sunday Night Football episodes back in 2019 alone, plus post-Super Bowl specials in 2015 and 2018.
“We’re thrilled to be teaming up with NBC Sports again this year for these Sunday night episodes,” Tonight Show showrunner Chris Miller said in a statement, adding the show generated more than 900 million social views from sports content last year and is on pace to cross a billion this year.
The Tonight Show airs in its regular Wednesday slot on Sept. 9, immediately following NBC’s Kickoff Game, a Super Bowl LX rematch between the Patriots and Seahawks that opens the 2026 season. Matthew McConaughey and Alix Earle are both booked as guests, with Riley Green providing a musical performance to round out tonight’s episode.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.