SiriusXM set out its 2026 NFL season plans on September 2, 2026, confirming live audio for every game from the regular season through the Super Bowl and naming five new on-air additions to SiriusXM NFL Radio, the channel it carries at position 88.

In short

SiriusXM will broadcast every NFL game live this season, in vehicles and through its app, and it has hired five new NFL names to host talk programming around those games. For advertisers, the point is not the football but the audio inventory attached to it: a season-long block of appointment listening now sitting behind a subscription tier that costs five dollars a month. If you buy audio, the size and shape of the addressable pool changes when a rights holder concentrates a sport into one channel and one low-priced entry point.

Every game, two feeds, one destination

The announcement, released from New York at 2:30 p.m. EDT on September 2, is a programming document rather than a commercial one. It names dates, times, channels and people. It does not name a single advertising product. The commercial consequences sit underneath the schedule.

Coverage begins with the 2026 NFL Kickoff Presented by YouTube TV on September 9 at 8:20 p.m. ET, when the defending champion Seattle Seahawks host the New England Patriots in a rematch of the previous February's Super Bowl. The following night, September 10 at 8:35 p.m. ET, brings the league's first international fixture of the season, with 2025 NFL MVP Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams facing the San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne, Australia.

According to SiriusXM, every game from the regular season through the Super Bowl is available to listeners both in their vehicles and through the SiriusXM app. The app carries home and visiting team broadcasts for every matchup. Subscribers with sports play-by-play can reach both home and road feeds directly on in-vehicle radios. The Week 1 schedule was published at SiriusXM.com/Sports.

That dual-feed arrangement is more than a convenience. Two commentary teams calling the same game produce two distinct inventory pools with different regional audience compositions, and both sit inside a single subscription relationship. A national advertiser buying the network reaches both. A regional advertiser reaches whichever fan base the local rights holder feeds.

The subscription ladder underneath the football

Access runs through several tiers. According to the company, NFL game broadcasts and the SiriusXM NFL Radio channel are available on the Platinum, All Access and Music & Entertainment plans, and also on SiriusXM Sports Pass, the sports-focused plan priced at five dollars per month.

Sports Pass is the newest element and the one with the clearest bearing on reach. SiriusXM set the plan at $5 monthly or $49 annually and scheduled it to launch on September 1, timing it to the start of the football calendar. The NFL announcement lands one day after that launch date and one week before kickoff. The sequencing is not accidental. A five-dollar entry point is only useful if there is something behind it that a listener wants in September, and a full slate of NFL games is the most reliable answer American audio has.

The same week that Sports Pass went live, SiriusXM also began carrying 23 Audacy sports stations under a 42-station agreement covering 29 US markets. Nine of those stations reach the full satellite subscriber base. The remaining fourteen require the newer 360L hardware or the app. That hardware split matters for anyone modelling reach: satellite spectrum is finite, streaming capacity is not, and the two delivery paths do not carry identical audiences.

Five new voices, and why talent counts as inventory

The roster additions are the substance of the release.

Drew Brees, Super Bowl XLIV MVP and a 13-time Pro Bowl quarterback inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this summer, joins the cast of the weekly show "Let's Go!" alongside Stafford, three-time National Sportswriter of the Year Peter King, and Emmy Award-winning broadcaster Jim Gray. The new season debuts on Monday, September 7 at 6 p.m. ET, with Stafford previewing the Rams fixture against the 49ers three days later at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the first NFL game ever played in Australia.

"I'm excited to join Jim Gray and our great list of guests on 'Let's Go' as we break down the biggest moments in the NFL every week, giving fans tons of insight and entertainment," said Brees.

New episodes run every Monday on SiriusXM NFL Radio. After the satellite airing, the show is distributed on all major podcast platforms, with additional bonus content confined to the SiriusXM app. "Let's Go!" is produced by Scratchy Productions and SiriusXM.

That distribution pattern is the commercially interesting part. A show that airs first on satellite and then moves to open podcast feeds occupies two separate advertising markets in sequence. The satellite window is subscription-funded. The podcast window is ad-funded and measurable through the standard audio serving stack, where host read endorsements have consistently commanded higher rates than produced spots. Bonus content held back for the app pulls in a third direction, toward subscriber retention rather than impressions.

Three further additions arrive on "The Players' Point," which SiriusXM describes as the only radio show hosted entirely by active NFL players. New York Giants defensive tackle Shelby Harris, New York Jets linebacker Demario Davis and free agent wide receiver Brandin Cooks will rotate as hosts alongside Carolina Panthers long snapper J.J. Jansen. Los Angeles Chargers fullback Alec Ingold returns as a co-host. The show airs Tuesdays at 6 p.m. ET.

Adam Thielen, who retired earlier this year after a 13-year career, has signed as a SiriusXM host and will appear Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on "Airing It Out" alongside Bob Papa. Thielen entered the league in 2014 as an undrafted free agent and spent 10 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, where he was voted to two Pro Bowls and named second-team All-Pro in 2017.

Five newly named additions, four fixed weekly slots, two of them consecutive on Tuesday. The pattern is familiar from the rest of the SiriusXM sports portfolio. Named talent creates a recurring appointment, the appointment creates predictable listening hours, and predictable hours are what a media planner can actually buy against.

The bench that was already there

The release also restates the existing lineup, which is unusually deep for a single-sport audio channel. Hall of Famers Tim Brown and Bill Polian are on the host roster, along with former NFL executives Pat Kirwan, Tom Telesco and Ran Carthon. The NFL Legends group runs to seventeen names: Rich Gannon, Jacob Hester, Todd Haley, Brad Hopkins, Ryan Leaf, Kirk Morrison, Allen Robinson, Isaiah Stanback, Max Starks, Robert Turbin, Solomon Wilcots, Matt Simms, Leger Douzable, Brian Hoyer, Christian Fauria, Ben DiNucci and Ryan Harris.

A separate group of insiders and radio veterans includes Vic Carucci, Zig Fracassi, Dan Leberfeld, Jade McCarthy, David Moulton, Bruce Murray, Bob Papa, Amber Theoharis, Amy Lawrence, Andrew Siciliano, Mike Dempsey, Bob Harris and Damon Amendolara.

According to SiriusXM, NFL Radio is the only 24/7 radio channel dedicated to the league, running football talk 365 days a year. That claim, if it holds, describes a year-round inventory floor rather than a seasonal spike. Most sports advertising planning assumes the opposite shape.

Sunday afternoon as a single block

The clearest structural asset in the announcement is "NFL Sunday Drive," which airs live from noon to 8 p.m. ET on Sundays while afternoon games are in progress. Hosts Steve Torre and Bill Lekas relay scores and highlights, move listeners in and out of multiple live game broadcasts, and conduct postgame interviews with players.

Eight uninterrupted hours, once a week, for the length of a season. The show functions as a whip-around service for people who cannot watch, which in practice means people in cars. That is the environment SiriusXM has always sold, and it is one of the few remaining media contexts where attention is close to captive and second-screen behaviour is physically constrained.

The advertising picture around the football

SiriusXM does not sell NFL audio in isolation. The company's advertising unit sits inside a wider structure that has changed considerably during 2026.

In April, SiriusXM Media became the exclusive United States advertising representative for YouTube's audio inventory, a deal built around research finding more than 212 million monthly listeners engaging with audio-first content on the platform. The company put the combined addressable reach at approximately 255 million monthly listeners, close to 90% of the United States population aged 13 and over. The boilerplate attached to the NFL release repeats that 255 million figure, up from the roughly 150 million to 170 million the company cited in comparable releases through 2025.

Financially, the audio advertising business has been improving slowly rather than sharply. SiriusXM reported second quarter 2026 advertising revenue of $454 million, a 5% increase, and raised full-year guidance by $25 million across revenue, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. The technical plumbing for the YouTube arrangement runs through AdsWizz, the ad platform Pandora acquired in 2018 for $145 million, which already handles programmatic guaranteed transactions and dynamic insertion across the portfolio.

The NFL season is where those two threads meet. Live sport supplies the listening hours. The advertising stack supplies the mechanism for selling them.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Football is the most contested inventory in American media, and the contest has moved decisively toward streaming. Proximic by Comscore documented 4.5 billion Live and Same Day hours of NFL viewing across a single regular seasonin its 2026 planning guide. Netflix carries the Melbourne fixture between the Rams and the 49ers as part of an expanded NFL slate that also includes Thanksgiving Eve, two Christmas Day games and a Week 18 fixture. Amazon holds Thursday Night Football, with the 2026 season opening September 17 with Detroit at Buffalo.

Every one of those is a video buy, negotiated in the upfront or through connected television demand-side platforms, and priced accordingly. Audio sits outside that competition and at a persistent discount. The gap is well documented: audio accounts for roughly 31% of consumer media time against approximately 9% of advertising budgets, a 22-percentage-point discrepancy that has held across multiple datasets.

Three specific implications follow from the September 2 announcement.

Concentration. Every game, both feeds, one channel, one app. There is no equivalent single point of access for NFL video. For a buyer who wants season-long presence against football audiences without negotiating separately with four or five rights holders, audio is structurally simpler.

Pricing. A five-dollar monthly tier lowers the barrier to entry for listeners who would not pay for a full entertainment package. Whether that converts into a materially larger audience will not be visible until third quarter or fourth quarter subscriber disclosures. The mechanism is clear enough; the magnitude is not.

Adjacency. Fantasy and wagering advertisers are among the heaviest programmatic buyers during the season, and the surrounding market has been building products for them. USA TODAY Sports began charging $39.99 a year for fantasy football tools this summer. Contextual segment providers have assembled gambling, sports betting and fantasy taxonomies specifically because that demand exists. NFL audio talk programming, running seven days a week with named former players, is a direct contextual match for those budgets.

There is a limit to what the announcement supports. SiriusXM disclosed no ad load figures, no sponsorship packages, no rate card and no audience projections for the season. The document names talent and schedules. Everything commercial has to be inferred from the structure, and the company has published nothing that would allow an outside party to verify how much of this inventory is actually sellable rather than reserved for subscription value.

The pattern is consistent with how SiriusXM has handled other sports verticals during the past year, including the dedicated WWE channel it launched on position 156 in July and the weekly Serie A show it introduced in late 2025. Each move adds listening hours or sellable inventory without a new league rights payment. The NFL arrangement is older and larger than either, but the operating logic around it is the same.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Sirius XM Holdings Inc., through its SiriusXM subscription service and SiriusXM NFL Radio channel. New on-air additions are Drew Brees, Shelby Harris, Demario Davis, Brandin Cooks and Adam Thielen. Existing hosts named in the release include Matthew Stafford, Peter King, Jim Gray, J.J. Jansen, Alec Ingold, Bob Papa, Steve Torre and Bill Lekas.

What: Live audio coverage of every NFL game from the regular season through the Super Bowl, delivered in vehicles and through the SiriusXM app with both home and visiting team feeds, alongside five new hosts across the weekly shows "Let's Go!", "The Players' Point" and "Airing It Out." Access runs through the Platinum, All Access and Music & Entertainment plans and through SiriusXM Sports Pass at five dollars per month.

When: Announced September 2, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. EDT. "Let's Go!" returns September 7. NFL Kickoff is September 9 at 8:20 p.m. ET. The Melbourne fixture is September 10 at 8:35 p.m. ET.

Where: SiriusXM NFL Radio on channel 88, plus in-vehicle satellite radios and the SiriusXM app across North America. The company states it reaches approximately 255 million monthly listeners across its platforms.

Why: Season-long football audio concentrates a large, recurring block of listening hours into a single channel and a single low-priced subscription tier at the moment audio advertising continues to trail its share of consumer media time. For buyers, the season creates a contextual environment for fantasy, wagering and automotive demand that video rights holders have fragmented across at least four separate platforms.