Here's the script for this week's "Sports at Large," which, as always, airs live each Monday at 5:30 p.m. on WYPR, 88.1 FM in Baltimore. If you live outside the state of Maryland, you can catch the streaming broadcast of the show at WYPR.org.
By this time next week, the first week of the NFL season will be nearly complete.
By then, you'll probably have had your fill of those warm and fuzzy public service spots in which football players wander through the community, roughhousing with kids, all to remind us how much the NFL family gives to your family.
That family portrait gets marred when you peek inside the cameras to see what's really on the negative.
As the Sports Business Daily reported last week, as many as 12 of the 32 NFL teams are facing the prospect that some of their home games this season will not be televised.
That's because those teams may not be able to sell those games out in time to lift the league's television blackout.
Jim Steeg, the chief operating officer of the San Diego Chargers told USA Today that blackouts are likely there this season. Miami, Oakland and St. Louis may also see blackouts this year, while Cleveland and Kansas City have yet to sellout all their games for the coming season.
The issue is most acute in Detroit and Jacksonville, where a combination of the deep recession and bad play on the field may keep the fans away from the stadiums in droves.
The Lions, who lost all 16 games last year, may need divine intervention to beat last year's mark of five blackouts, while in Jacksonville, all eight Jaguars home games might be kept off local television.
Now, here's where that generosity of the NFL spirit should kick in. The league has for more than 30 years had a hard and fast rule that unless a game is sold out 72 hours before kickoff, it will not be shown on local television.
With thousands of fans not currently having the means to pay for pricey football seats, the NFL could relax the blackout rule in a variety of ways.
They could cut the deadline for sellout down to 48 or 24 hours. They could cut the percentage of tickets sold needed to waive the blackout to 75 or 80 percent, rather than a full 100.
Better yet, the league should have scrapped the entire blackout policy years ago. The NFL is the only sports organization, college or professional, that puts this kind of stipulation on when and how its fans can see games.
Imagine the goodwill the league would engender if Commissioner Roger Goodell said the blackout policy would go away for a year, if not for good?
Instead, a league spokesman told the Sports Business Daily that there is no consideration being given to changing blackout policy, that keeping the blackout is quote important to supporting the ability of the clubs to sell tickets and keeping our games attractive as television programming with large crowds unquote.
And that, my friends, is the real NFL family portrait. It may look like the Waltons are posing for the shot, but when the picture's developed, you find you're really looking at the Corleones.
2 comments:
Personally, I won't weep for blackouts in Jacksonville, a city that never had any business getting an NFL team.
The blackout rule serves an owner's best business interests. Let's try to stay focused on the fact franchises are not public trusts. And would-be fans don't have a right to watch games on TV.
As the league spokesman in the SBD article alluded, revenues from ticket, concession, and parking sales are the owners' bread and butter. There's no financial benefit in giving their product away for free with the knowledge fans have more than enough lead time to buy tickets. However...
A reduction in ticket prices is warranted and long overdue, joined with a corresponding reduction in concession prices and parking fees. Isn't that what a 'normal' business (one that doesn't enjoy a friggin' loosely-regulated monopoly) would do to stay competitive? Those owners who can't figure out this very elementary marketing strategy for themselves shouldn't be able to cloak their incompetence with subsidies from local TV and radio revenues.
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