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Article IndexThe NFL shouldn't be crying about losing money from empty seats. The 32 teams will get nearly $28 billion in television rights fees from various media companies between 2014 and 2022. Television dollars have been an essential part of professional football since 1960. American Football League founder Lamar Hunt co-opted a plan from Branch Rickey's stillborn Continental Baseball League that called for each of the eight American Football League franchises to split money equally from a five year deal with the American Broadcasting Company starting in the AFL's first season in 1960.
New National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle co-opted Lamar Hunt's AFL TV plan in 1961 but could not implement an NFL TV revenue sharing plan until Congress and President John F. Kennedy shielded the league from antitrust law violation. The Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 gave Rozelle (and every other sports league in the United States with the exception of the American and National Leagues of Major League Baseball because Baseball had a blanket antitrust exemption given to the business by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1922) the ability to take the NFL's 14 teams and sell the them as one entity to a television network. That piece of legislation, signed into law by Kennedy on September 30, 1961, gave the NFL the tools it needed to become a financial juggernaut.
Rozelle played off the two dominant American TV networks at the time, William Paley's Columbia Broadcasting System and David Sarnoff's National Broadcasting Company. and got them into a bidding war for NFL rights. Paley's CBS won the first round for the TV deal and landed NFL rights for 1962 and 1963. Sarnoff lost the NFL but stabilized Hunt's AFL by giving the league a five year deal starting in 1965 worth about $35 million. With that money, AFL teams were able to sign big name college players like Joe Namath. By 1966, the two leagues merged and Congress stepped in once again giving cover to the NFL and AFL by approving the marriage between the two rivals. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation allowing the 15 team NFL to realign with the nine team AFL.
The NFL is the most valuable TV property in the United States. The Super Bowl is now played in February and that is significant to television networks as February is a sweeps month and the TV ratings from that month are used to set advertising rates. The Super Bowl is the most watched TV show in the United States and the network that has the rights to the game almost always wins the February sweeps.
NFL games are ideal for advertising looking to reach men between the ages of 18 and 34 and 25 and 54. The league knows this and is able to extract billions from television partners.
Apparently the new football contracts have been very good for the individual NFL owners. The publicly owned Green Bay Packers reported a nearly $28 million profit in 2011. That is pretty good for a team that plays in the smallest market of any major sports franchise in North America. Because the other 31 NFL teams are privately owned, there is no way of knowing how successful a franchise is unless an owner decides to release financial records.
The guess is that all NFL teams are doing well.
The NFL knows that local TV affiliates want home team games and the Giants and Jets have bent the blackout rules since the opening of the new Meadowlands stadium to show games locally on CBS and FOX despite not selling every ticket in the place. The NFL has relaxed the TV blackout rules which called for the home team market and secondary markets not to receive a game on local TV if the stadium was not sold out 72 hours prior to kickoff. Now teams can lift the blackout if they so choose with a guarantee of 85 percent of the stadium tickets being sold.
It doesn't pay to get your television partners upset over a few thousand empty seats...or does it?
Indianapolis ownership however has decided that the Indianapolis market will not get Colts games if the team does not sell out the stadium.
http://www.freeonfire.com/air-max-2012
I don't know what Saints tickets are going for now but, whatever they are, they're well out of this struggling writer's limited means. I'm always hearing complaints from people about how much they're paying for game day tickets but, the point is, they're STILL paying. It's the same people who bitch about the cost of a day at the JazzFest going up from $25 a day four or five years ago to over $60 today, but that hasn't stopped them from going. Or the ones who bitch about the ever-increasing cost of joining a Carnival krewe (sometimes into the thousands of dollars) just so they can have one day of fun when they parade during Mardi Gras, yet they still pay. When people want to do something bad enough they'll find a way to do it and they'll find the money that makes it possible.
The only language the NFL is ever going to understand -- or the JazzFest people or the Carnival krewes -- is when enough people have decided they've had enough and they're going to boycott these events en masse. And, as you and I know, that day will probably never come. Why? They want to have their fun and they'll pay whatever price it takes to partake of their guilty pleasures. C'est le vie.