Inside the NFL will return for the 2025-2026 season, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, but the long-running studio show is getting a wholesale reboot, changing formats, and moving to a new home: X, the tech platform controlled by Elon Musk.

Inside the NFL on X will debut its first episode on Sept. 8, with plans to release at least 10 short-form episodes each week leading up to next year’s Super Bowl on Feb. 8. NFL Films will continue to produce the series. Ryan Clark, the ESPN NFL analyst and former safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers, will host the show, though NFL Films executives suggest that other names could join him as the season progresses.

The new version of Inside the NFL will take many of the segments from the studio show and turn into shorter-form fare, including “Mic’d Up Moments,” with exclusive first-to-air audio captured by the NFL Films team; “Big Game Edits,” featuring cinematic recaps of the week’s biggest games; “Wire Watch,” where players react to their own mic’d up moments; and panel discussions, led by Clark.

“The beauty of releasing content on X is that you’re not confined to a rigid TV format – this doesn’t need to be a strict half-hour or hour-long programming block. One episode could be one minute; another could be five minutes,” Mitch Smith, head of original content for X, tells THR. “It also allows the episodes to adapt to the storylines of the season more quickly and organically based on what’s going on competitively throughout the season. I’m excited to see what NFL Films does with this type of creative freedom.”

“The way we all watch this kind of stuff has evolved so much in the last few years,” adds Keith Cossrow, head of content for NFL Films. “NFL Films has used X quite a bit to post some of our best Mic’d Up audio – always promoting Inside the NFL on TV – and those numbers have been great. This summer we partnered with X to present another longtime NFL Films franchise, The Top 100, in a wholly new way and again saw strong results. At some point the light bulb went on for all of us here at Films: maybe it’s time to cut out the middle man, so to speak, and go directly to our audience which seems to be consuming this stuff mostly on social media anyway. As soon as we pitched the concept of posting daily shortform Inside the NFL ‘episodes’ to X, they lit up. So we all feel like it’s a perfect fit. Now we’ll see if we’re right.”

Still, the change is a big one, especially for a show that can trace its origins back nearly half a century (the show debuted in 1977), from HBO and Showtime to Paramount+ and, most recently The CW, which opted not to bring the show back earlier this year.

“Gone are the days when Inside the NFL is going to do a highlight package for every game, and we know that bothers some long-time fans of the show. It bothers us too!” Cossrow says. “But we all have to adapt. There is so much content coming from every direction now. I think everyone in the business has to focus on the things that set their stuff apart and NFL Films is no exception. So we will focus on delivering the very best of what our cameras and mics capture: the most exclusive elements from the biggest games and stars, as fast as we possibly can.”

For X, the deal significantly bolsters its original NFL content, and keeps it coming at a regular cadence throughout the season. Live sports are a key driver of engagement on the platform, Smith says.

“Football fandom thrives on X, a top conversation category, and the NFL, a key longstanding partner, helps fuel our original content vertical,” Smith says. “With NFL Top 100, X’s first original series with the NFL and NFL Films, we achieved massive viewership, engagement, and retention during the preseason. On the heels of that success, we all knew we wanted to crack our first in-season original series together.

“What better way to do it then by taking another iconic IP that has tremendous legacy value & cultural meaning, and reinventing it for a digital-first audience, deploying it where they already consume and converse around their favorite NFL content,” he adds. “This is the future of entertainment – the NFL can own the relationship with their audience and their fanbase through premium content on X in a more direct way than if this aired on television – and we want to empower creators of all sizes to own that relationship with their audience on the most inherently social platform.”