So much for “commercial-free football.”
NFL RedZone, one of the most popular sports telecasts, has increased the number of commercials during its seven-hour broadcast. At the beginning of the season, the league said it would be airing only four 15-second ads throughout its telecast in Week 1. But during Sunday’s Week 13 broadcast, RedZone aired 16 advertisements ranging from 15 to 20 seconds long, according to Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter.
The telecast ran two minutes of double-box advertisements, evenly split across the early and late windows of games. The league ran the same number of double-box ads in Week 1. The broadcast also displayed a 30-second double-box ad with DraftKings once the games ended. RedZone added the double-box advertisements in 2025 as a way to monetize the show.
It also continued to run its graphic banner ads (each around 20 seconds) and is now airing more sponsored segments throughout the show. Carpenter found that Allstate sponsored a 30-second “Good Hands” segment, and Progressive, Lowe’s, DraftKings, Mercedes-Benz and Accenture each had their own sponsored segments.
In total, combining double-box ads, banner ads and sponsored segments, NFL RedZone aired 16 elements of sponsored content for a combined total of five minutes and 10 seconds during Sunday’s broadcast.
Several fans on social media voiced their frustration about the increased number of advertisements, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions or stop watching the telecast altogether. NFL insider Adam Schefter’s Sept. 4 X post defending the move — saying “viewers will be served 1-2 total minutes of ads in :15 increments. This comes out to anywhere between 0.25% – 0.5% of the total time, considerably less than other sports/entertainment programs” — also resurfaced and was heavily criticized.
The decision to put ads on RedZone rests entirely with the NFL, whose multibillion-dollar business depends on licensing its product to TV networks — and on those networks selling commercial time to companies eager to reach the league’s tens of millions of weekly viewers.
Though it was expected that RedZone would slowly integrate more advertisements into its telecast, the stark change is still unusual for fans who’ve heard host Scott Hanson’s catchphrase of “Seven hours of commercial-free football starts now” for years. But the broadcast still remains wildly popular and is one of the unique telecasts across sports.