While Major League Baseball may not have the same presence on ESPN it once did, the league still helps fill a significant portion of the network’s programming.
That includes a prime piece of real estate — Sunday nights — with 26 consecutive Sunday Night Baseball editions throughout the MLB season.
Following the news that both sides have opted out of their rights deal following the 2025 season in a reportedly not-so-mutual split, ESPN now finds itself looking to fill half a year’s worth of Sunday night slots beginning in 2026 and beyond.
What might the Worldwide Leader’s new Sunday night schedule look like after this year? As Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis notes, it could be fairly straightforward.
Spring: NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, Stanley Cup Playoffs
With the start of Sunday Night Baseball coinciding with the heart of March Madness, finding a replacement for the first few weeks of the season should be easy. Currently, ESPN’s coverage of the NCAA Women’s Tournament Elite Eight airs in the afternoon due to SNB, and it would be a shock if the games didn’t move to primetime beginning in 2026.
As Lewis notes, the National Championship Game could get a little trickier, as it is contractually obligated to air on ABC and does so in the afternoon to avoid preempting primetime network programming. However, having Sunday night available for an ESPN simulcast could help change that calculus, especially considering the growing nature of the women’s game.
As for the rest of the spring, expect ESPN to further leverage its NHL media rights deal, giving the Stanley Cup Playoffs a Sunday night showcase. The previous obvious answer would have been the NBA, which is set to shift to NBC on Sunday nights beginning next season, creating the potential for some major channel flipping next spring.
If the hockey schedule doesn’t fill every void left in ESPN’s Sunday night programming, it’s worth noting that the network is also a rightsholder for the United Football League (UFL) for both the regular season and postseason.
Summer: College World Series, WNBA, TGL(?)
While ESPN’s spring schedule might be straightforward, summer solutions are less obvious. Still, there are plenty of options to choose from, with perhaps the most obvious being the College World Series, which will carry the torch throughout the remainder of June following the Stanley Cup Playoffs (Game 7 of last year’s Finals aired on June 24).
After — or perhaps even before — that, it should be the WNBA’s time to shine, as a weekly primetime showcase seems like a matter of not “if” but “when” amid the league’s exploding popularity in the Caitlin Clark era.
With the league’s schedule lasting from May to September and the postseason running through October, ESPN will have plenty of flexibility in how it positions such showcases. Lewis also points out the NBA Summer League as an option, with the potential expansion of TGL’s schedule following its promising start making for another intriguing possibility.
Fall: US Open Tennis, WNBA Playoffs
The expanded US Open schedule gives ESPN another option beginning in late August and could help ESPN fill its schedule for as many as three Sundays. From there, the WNBA Playoffs should fill the bulk of the Worldwide Leader’s Sunday night programming with a postseason that should take it through the remainder of the baseball season.
It’s hard to view anyone as a bigger winner of MLB’s split with ESPN than the WNBA, which could help fill programming from mid-May until late October. How the network chooses to leverage that partnership will ultimately determine how it fills out the rest of its schedule.
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