Adding advertising to previously ad-free products is one of the many bad developments of the 2020s. This is true of many streaming services, most frustratingly Netflix, but the desire to nickel-and-dime your customers at all costs is shared by many.
Over the past two years, NFL RedZone has been the latest product to succumb to those desires. While Scott Hanson once proudly boasted, “Seven hours of commercial-free football starts now,” the tagline was forced to change (it’s now called “RedZone football”), and ads suddenly appeared.
RedZone fans were assured the ads wouldn’t be all that intrusive, but once the commercial load was fully realized, fans quickly pointed out that, yes, they were quite intrusive.
Heading into the 2026 season, Hanson assured fans that the ad load would be coming down.
“I could tell you from where we ended last year, there will not be more,” Hanson told Front Office Sports’s Baker Machado ahead of Week 1. “In fact, the actual ads that you see, there will be fewer of what we call the 15-second commercials with the audio going and the product and whatnot.”
One week in, it appears that RedZone is making good on its promise. As Josh Carpenter at Sports Business Journal observed on Sunday, the first edition of RedZone for the 2026 season featured a 50% cut in advertising compared to last year.
NFL RedZone cut its commercial load in half on Sunday.
Sunday’s broadcast had just 1 minute of the controversial double-box ads (four ads, 15 seconds each) that debuted in 2025.
Late last season, RedZone was running 2 minutes of those ads during the Sunday windows. pic.twitter.com/K7k8J0gc62
— Josh Carpenter (@JoshACarpenter) September 13, 2026
While it is still not the ideal of “commercial-free football,” which, again, was the product people happily bought for years before the shift to ads, seeing the ad line move down as opposed to up is inarguably a good thing.
The glory days of commercial-free football may be over. If a relatively commercial-lite football is the best we can hope for now, then it will have to do.
About Tyler Lauletta
Tyler is a editorial contributor at Awful Announcing, with previous stops at Sports Illustrated and Business Insider during his career covering sports in digital media. He is, begrudgingly, a Truster of the Process and general Philly sports sicko.