NFL Claims Blackout Policy Ensures More Games are Televised

For the past 40 years, there's been a policy that if a home professional football team hasn't sold out tickets at least 72 hours prior to kickoff, the game is subject to a broadcast blackout.

The policy is political pigskin, kicked around by fans, lawmakers and TV companies everywhere. Everyone has always assumed that the policy was meant to ensure great live attendance, but the National Football League is telling the Federal Communications Commission that the policy also ensures that games are televised. The league isn't prepared to let the blackout rule die easily, saying that the system works well for the public and fans.

The league notes that of 256 regular season games in 2013, only two were blacked out. Of course, that was a pretty blackout-light year, but it doesn't stop the league from boasting that the number of blackouts has plunged 92 percent since 2003.

Next, the NFL makes the argument that when Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, it "adopted the blackout provision not for the sake of protecting the gate in its own right, but instead for the purpose of promoting sports on broadcast television." The league asserts that the rule was one of the big reasons why it was able to enter into exclusive contracts with broadcasters in the first place.

But the NFL goes even further by making the counterintuitive argument that blackouts are leading to more football games on television. "Proponents of repeal rely on the entirely unsupported assumption that the commission’s sports blackout rule reduces the availability of professional sports on television," says the NFL. "To the contrary, over the long run the blackout rule actually increases the availability of sports games on television by encouraging broadcasters and professional sports leagues to reach deals for exclusive broadcast rights."