Word: rulings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Granted, the league would take issue with that characterization, but it is nonetheless how many football fans feel about the so-called blackout rule. In recent years, the policy that a game would not be broadcast in a team's local market if it did not sell out its stadium 72 hours prior to kickoff - which dates to 1973, when the league feared that TV broadcasts would stop people from buying tickets - affected just a handful of games. But in the wake of the nation's worst recession in decades, as many as a dozen...
...passionate fans - the NFL even blocks satellite-TV signals so bars can't broadcast the game from out of town - it's this one. Despite the recession, from 2008 through 2011, the league will have received $11.6 billion from its network-television partners. Thus, it is keeping the blackout rule to maximize lucrative game-day revenues...
...games, everything around the business of the NFL has been compromised," says David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California, who says that crucial revenues to pay players, stadium bonds and private investors are at risk. Another reason for the rule is that the league believes a full house with screaming fans enhances the television-viewing experience. "If you're watching at home and you see a lot of empty seats, you're going to start wondering to yourself, What's wrong with me? Why am I watching this when people aren...
...likes to believe that the blackout rule has helped spur its incredible growth over the past few decades, but the policy does not necessarily deserve a ton of credit. Say you live in Detroit and have no plans to attend a Lions game early in the week. A few days later, you hear that if the game doesn't sell out, it won't be shown in the Detroit market. Are you really going to shell out good money so that someone else can watch it at home? "Are people really behaving that way?" asks Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist...
...flip side, of course, is that so far there is no evidence that the blackout rule has really alienated any part of the league's huge, dedicated fan base. But if it begins to have a wider impact, frequent local blackouts could do some long-term damage to the NFL's business. In Detroit, Yuille believes that after five Lions games were blacked out last year, casual fans completely lost interest in football. "More than anything, television is a mass-market promoter of a sport," says Zimbalist. "You don't want to cut that...