The Tennessee Titans were shut out of the NFL’s primetime schedule this year. Again.

This shouldn’t come as a particular surprise to any Titans fans who have watched their team flounder through turmoil for years now, stringing together just six total wins the past two seasons. The team already sits on the lower end of the market size totem pole, and they lack the starpower or recent results in the win column to make up for that. Even so, Cam Ward going two full seasons into his NFL career without a primetime appearance feels wrong when you say it out loud.

An NFL executive addressed the league’s final version of the schedule on Friday, mentioning the Titans’ primetime situations specifically. He claimed to share the truth despite dancing around it, but he did dangle a carrot out in front of Titans fans for later this year.

NFL VP Mike North addresses Titans being left out of primetime schedule

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the Titan were left out of the primetime schedule for 2026 alongside four other current bottom-dwellers. But NFL VP of Broadcast Planning Mike North tried to put lipstick on the pig during his conference call with media.

“Look, the truth is, it’s not just about primetime,” North tried to sell. “I know there’s a lot of chatter yesterday [and] today. How many primetime appearances did this team get? Why didn’t we get more prime times? It’s not just about prime time, right? It’s also about the 4:25 pm national television window on Sunday afternoon on CBS and Fox, still our most watched window, so maybe you didn’t get as many primes as you wanted, but a couple of 4:25 pm windows are still going to end up being more widely viewed, maybe, than any primetime game.”

He’s not wrong about the popularity of the late afternoon window on Sunday, which is dominated by West Coast matchups as a natural result of time zone convenience. They get a huge national crowd. And the Titans enjoyed (or suffered, depending on how you look at it) five such late games in 2025 thanks to a double-d0se of western divisional pairings.

But this is a tidy attempt to help primetime-lean fans cope. The real fact of the matter is that as the league continues to charge more and more money for these standalone windows in an increasingly competitive platform market, their incentive to put the biggest draws in primetime is growing. Amazon Prime and YouTube TV are paying too much for clunkers; they want heavyweight fights. Teams like Tennessee don’t yet qualify.’

North went on to mention the Titans’ situation in particular.

“And then relative to a team like the Jets or the Cardinals or anybody else, the Titans, who felt like they didn’t get as much national television exposure as they were hoping to, that’s what flexible scheduling is for,” North teased. “That’s why we put it in. That’s why we work with our partners every year to ensure that the teams that have played their way into bigger television windows have an opportunity to be rewarded when we get into November and December. And the crystal ball isn’t always as clear as we hoped.”

Some may see this as an encouraging tease. I would argue it’s a cruel one, given the likelihood of how late into the season this renovated roster will actually remain in the playoff hunt. But here’s the promising bit: it tells me that league executives have at least some desire to put the Titans and their stories in the national spotlight. Cam Ward can sell. This coaching staff has a national audience already. There are some interesting players on this team primed to be an interesting group to follow.

But the league wants them to prove it first. They’re daring the Titans to make them want to bump them up in November and December. All the Titans have to do is get out there and do it.