NFL Not Going To Budge On Blackouts — Will Post Games Online
The NFL's blackout rule — which prevents games from being broadcast in home markets if there is no sellout — is coming under fire lately as some teams (ok, let's face it, we're talking about Jacksonville) might not have a single home sellout all season.
Time says that the NFL is sticking to the blackout rule. The teams themselves aren't budging either. So far, despite the recession and a decrease in sales — they've actually raised ticket prices:
And as much as some local officials may be griping about it, teams aren't necessarily helping. Some teams that are facing the prospect of blackouts haven't even lowered their ticket prices to entice fans. In Jacksonville, for example, the average general-admission ticket costs $57.34, a 3.7% increase from 2008, according to Team Marketing Report. The average premium seat now costs $229.17, a 15% increase over the previous year. And local network affiliates aren't necessarily upset that they have to sometimes air a different game, since more competitive teams playing can actually translate to better ratings.
It looks like the following teams are in danger of blackouts: Arizona, Cincinnati, Detroit, Jacksonville, Minnesota and San Diego. Gothamist is concerned that there may be a blackout of the upcoming Jets/Patriots game, though we suspect they worry needlessly.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says that he expects about 20% of NFL games to be blacked out this season. Last year 9 games were unavailable — and five of them involved the still-winless Detroit Lions. Time sums up that situation rather succinctly:
With unemployment hovering around 30%, it's not easy for folks in the Motor City to shell out a few hundred bucks to attend a game and cheer on the first team in NFL history to finish the season 0-16, as the Lions did last year.
For those of you in blacked-out markets, the NFL is offering those games on-line free of charge through their NFL Game Rewind service. You can watch the games beginning at midnight on the day of the game and they remain available for 72 hours (except during ESPN Monday Night Football telecasts).
"We understand that the economy is limiting some families and corporations from buying as many game tickets as they had previously," said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. "These free re-broadcasts on NFL.com will allow our fans that can't get to a blacked-out game an opportunity to see the entire game."
NFL Network's NFL Replay to Encore Four Games Each Week [NFL]
With Fewer Sellouts, NFL's Blackout Rule Under Fire [Time]
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The games were never blacked out from my $40/game seats in the Jack. Sucks that I moved to Philly (I hate the Eagles), but I still pay for the tickets. My parents use them now.
Sweet! Perhaps this increase in bandwidth consumption for "legitimate" things will encourage providers to lift caps?
Nahhh, who am I kidding? SET GOUGING BEAM AT MAXIMUM!
Many teams cut the price of remaining tickets on gameday. Want to see the game, get off your duff and buy a ticket.
/Chiefs season ticket holder since 1989
What's to keep the teams from deactivating seats in their own stadium? MLB teams do it all the time when they know the upper decks won't be sold or used, effectively lowering seating capacity until or unless there's a surge in demand (like Tampa in their playoff run). Most of Oakland's upper deck stays covered with a tarp during A's games but the seats are uncovered for Raiders games.
If J'ville thinks they'll fall X-thousand tickets short of selling out, why not put tarps over X-thousand of the worst seats in the house and take them off the market? Then, if the game is "sold out" by the required deadline, they could release the seats for walk-up sales on the day of the game.
Ford Sr needs to die already and let Detroit be run by somebody who has at least some slight interest of turing the Lions into a contender. Last year was the first year they didn't sell out game after game.
The problem, Detroit Season Ticket holders are morons. As long as they're still selling Season Tickets, they have no reason to do something. You want a good team? Stop buying Season tickets. Except, then the team gets good and you lost your tickets. So nobody wants to be the guy who got rid of his tickets at the 50 yard line and then the team turns it around.
See the cycle? See the stupidity? Detroit's color's suck, the logo is even worse now that they modernized it, and the team doesn't win. They make nothing on the franchise outside of Detroit.
The NFL doesn't help things with blackouts. I see the logic behind them, but in towns where even the diehard fans are beginning to second guess stuff, it hurts the teams. I just watch Pittsburgh now.
Blackouts make NO SENSE.
If Detroit wants to increase its fan base- it needs to be on TV. Best advertisement is sitting at home on TV and watching your bad team dismantle a playoff contender, thinking "man- I wish I coulda been there."
And... its basic supply and demand-- if you don't provide a good product, you need to lower prices.
@HIV 2 Elway: Sweet. Get me a job so I can buy one regardless of cost.
/person speaking on behalf of recession but not actually effected
Is there any way they could retroactively black out last weeks Bengal game?
@Schmack:
They do do that, but the NFL has to approve the tarping off of seats. I believe Jacksonville may be one of the teams that already has an exception from the NFL. I could be wrong though.
@Schmack: I believe they have done that in the past, but for some reason I remember them not selling a certain number of seats required.
It doesn't help that the total cost of the afternoon is in the hundreds of dollars. I got Sunday Ticket (they even threw in the HD and online features free) and never looked back. At $300 for the season it's a bargain.
Um. They don't tarp off the entire upper deck. I should know, my seats were in section 410, which is the upper deck on the west side on the 50.
The Jack seats about 76,000 if my memory serves. They tarp off about 10,000 seats, 2 sections in the upper deck corners (8 total sections) plus some seats in the north end zone. This puts them at about 66,000 seats, which is in line with most mid to large market stadiums.
Jacksonville is the smallest market in the NFL with one of the largest stadiums in he NFL.
So pretty much they're shooting themselves in the foot here? They raised ticket prices in a recession, so hardly anybody can afford them so they don't go, and because of that they black out games.
So...they're losing out on profits from the tickets because they won't lower prices, and then they turn around and black out the games so they also lose profits on any commercials that would have played during the game....
How is this a wise thing to do?
Wow a rebroadcast OoO. NFL needs to get with it and stream all games ASAP. I had to install some sketchy software to watch this weekends games, and for Monday Night I watched some stream from Iraq, I mean how silly is that.
@katsuyakaiba: The local stations lose money on local ads. This doesn't impact the NFL's TV deals or national advertisers.
Much like other things it costs money to be an NFL fan. Pony up, buy a ticket, pay for Sunday ticket, or buy drinks at a sports bar. It's not free, few things are. You can't be much of a music or performing arts fan without dishing out some cash, why do we expect pro sports to be different?
That's big-time sports for you: an illusion that it has anything to do with fans or geography.
Idiots. The rule should be aggregate price of empty seats - potential TV ad revenue. If that number is still positive, black out the game. Otherwise, you're throwing away perfectly good money.
Just another example of how this recession has businesses doing horrifically stupid things, because they're desperate for money in the short-term (in this case, in the form of ticket sales) at the expense of the long term (i.e. keeping their fan bases happy). That's because they have staunchly refused to learn the basic lesson of the recession, which is that extraordinary short-term gains always incur long-term losses later. In an obstinate and almost infantile fashion, they refuse to acknowledge this basic truth, which economists have made famous in the phrase, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Another factor driving the teams, no doubt, are the upcoming players' contract talks, and the specter of a strike and/or lockout. The teams are angling to scoop up as much "fast cash" as they can get, right now. This exacerbates rather than alleviates the teams' obsession with short-term gains.
Of course, they can only do this, because football fans are so eager to watch. If they boycotted the NFL, the league and the teams would have no choice but to cave in. However, I'm not betting this will happen ... 'cause Joe Sixpack can't go without his Steelers game every week.
@JGKojak: I really never understood their logic here either. It's completely counterituitive to everything we know. More blackouts means less viewers, less viewers means less revenue. Seems simple to me.
I especially hate the rule where they can't show two games at the same time if one game is a team in the home market. Nothing is more frustrating then watching an intense tie with a minute left get dropped to watch the pre-game warmups of the home team.
It boggles my mind that the league/franchises are so MORONICALLY STUPID as to believe that this is going to *encourage* people to buy tickets.
ATTENTION IDIOTS IN THE HEAD OFFICE: Not showing your games on TV loses you fans. Period. People categorically DO NOT buy tickets to a game *because they can't see it on TV*. Blacking out games loses you potential new fans, because they don't get to see what it is you want them to get interested in. Think about that...you want new fans to get interested in your team, right? But if they can't get any exposure to them, well, why should they care? And existing fans are just simply going to be pissed off because they can't watch the team that they love. YOU LOSE in every possible outcome when you blackout a game.
NO ONE is going to care more about a team that blacks out it's games than a team that doesn't. Period, end of story. I'm not going to like a dog that bites me once in a while than a dog that never does. And I sure as hell am not going to give the asshole dog more food than the nice dog.
NFL: Take your blackout games and head straight to the unemployment line...'cause that's where they're going to get you.
@JGKojak: I completely agree with you, the blackout rules have never made sense to me. When I was in high school the Bills played the Oilers in wildcard game to start the playoffs. The game was blacked out locally. I had to move our antennae to pick up a washed out grainy signal from a station in Binghamton, NY, that was just outside of the blackout radius. The Bills went on to have the greatest comeback in NFL history in the second half and won the game. They went to the superbowl that year. Being able to watch that game is one of the main reasons that 15 years later, after a decade of mediocrity I am still a Bills fan. Why didn't everyone in the area get to watch the game as well...
The thing is that for me an 99% of football fans the choice isn't between watching the local team on TV and watching them live. It's between watching the local team on TV and watching Philly/Giants on TV.
I wish the Cardinals games would get blacked out. Then I'd actually get to see a team I like instead of the crappy Cardinals. Yeah, I know they went to the Super Bowl last year, but that franchise has sucked for too long. I hate 'em.
@Hooray4Zoidberg: Seriously, the ad revenue lost from blacking out has to be much larger than the revenue lost from a few unsold seats.
A jump from 9 blacked-out games in 2008 to a (projected) 100+ is pretty dramatic. I don't think it's just ticket prices either. An NFL game can be a painful experience. Traffic, parking, long lines to be searched, $10 beers, TV time-outs, blaring music between plays, uncomfortable seating, obnoxious fans, giant TVs that show too few replays just to name a few things that bug me. The worst is everyone these days has fantasy teams and various other things riding on the games yet a football stadium is seemingly the worst place to be to stay informed of what's going on around the league. Why not show highlights from around the league on those giant TVs. A tiny scoreboard in the corner with scores that are 15 minutes behind is an insult.
I would much rather watch the NFL on my couch or with friends at the corner bar where I can get the FULL experience than suffer through the diminished live experience of going to a game. I suspect others feel the same. Go ahead, NFL, keep raising prices and ignoring the quality of the product and people will ignore you.
Who cares. Maybe they'll loose fans due to loss of interest and have to make some huge concessions in salaries and profits for owners. Be about time to see this big $$$ game brought back to realistic terms.
@Schmack: Also, per the rule, if a team closes off seats, those seats must remain closed for the remainder of the season. If you need a reference, look at the one in the wikipedia article on the NFL Blackout.
Being in Jacksonville, I wonder when they are going to move this team to another market. Jacksonville is a small town that wishes it was a large city. Add in that a huge number of the population are not native to Jacksonville (read: Military) and it's hard for this team to really exist. People don't go to Jags games to see the Jags. They go to see the other team that they've been rooting for their entire life. In my workcenter we can only count one true Jags fan: the only guy that is actually from Jacksonville.
I continually insist that the Jags will eventually be relocated, most likely to LA. They had a problem of selling out the stadium when the Jags were (possibly) playoff bound. Even Winn-Dixie buying blocks of seats couldn't stop the blackout.
Don't give me garbage about the stadium being large. That thing sells out and then some for the UGA-FU game every year (they end up adding extra seats to accommodate all the fans). Hopefully the NFL will wake up and move this team to a city that can actually support it.
@prag: Good point. To me, the flaw in the blackout plan is the underlying assumption that watching the game on TV and going to the game are equivalent. I think they're very different experiences. I might plan to go to only one game a year because that's all I can afford (both money- and time-wise), but I definitely want to watch all eight home games. To be unable to watch it on TV because I can't scrape together the cash or time to drive an hour to the stadium, park, etc., is terribly unfair. As a fan of a team whose departure from the home city is possible, it seems counterintuitive to drive away the fan base.
@Schmack: I was ROFL'ing when I saw Tampa Bay in the playoffs last year. They were in the ALCS, and they still had tarps over entire sections of seats because they couldn't sell to capacity. The team was on the verge of going to their first WS appearance and they couldn't even sell out a single game. Come on!
Jacksonville? I don't think Oakland has sold out a game in years...
@G.O.B.: Packers WIN. Cutler who?: Add in that the Trop is not that big of a stadium . . . it's insane. I don't understand why FL has as many Pro teams as they do.
@zlionsfan: #1 I don't want DirectTV, I don't have cable or DISH and have no desire to get it. I do want streaming, and am willing to pay for it (like the rest of the world gets too from Yahoo GamePass), although NBC is demonstrating that is not really a requirement.
#2 MNF games are not streaming on DirectTV. Yes even after spending $350 still no legal way to stream last night's game. I am sorry but that is FAIL.
Its so great to be a 'Sconnie and a hardcore Packers fan :)
@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): LOL @ the hype. Franchise quarterback! Pro Bowler! More like Rex Grossman reincarnated. Good luck against Pittsburgh. :D
The problem with blackouts is that once upon a time, many, many years ago, they made sense. I really have read about a time when going to an NFL game was a simple decision at a reasonable price (of course this was because the owners paid the players next to nothing), and so yes, in the '50s and maybe '60s, you might want to think about getting people to come to the game. A reasonable person would point out some of the arguments above, that people don't want to pay to watch bad teams anyway, but that never happened.
Anyway, the other thing about that era that made blackouts reasonable was alternatives, as in "lack of". There were hardly any other games on. If you wanted sports, you went to the game or you watched the one game a week the networks felt like showing.
Nowadays, neither scenario is remotely possible. Even one single-game ticket can be pricey, and do you really want to watch the game by yourself? A skilled, patient person may be able to find cheap parking (you can park for free in Indianapolis, for example, if you don't mind a bit of a walk) and skip the beer-and-hot-dog trap at the stadium, but why? If a ticket is $20, you're probably going to spend more like $40 to have a good time. (Unless you like to drink at games, then make it $60.) For a lot of people, that's not a spur-of-the-moment purchase, and for those for whom it is, season tickets are probably just as likely a decision: they've already got their seats and a blackout isn't going to make them go to the game.
As others have said, with so many options on TV now, who cares if the local team isn't on TV? Someone or some place near you has Sunday Ticket if you don't. Watch the games you want, or watch NHL games starting in October and NBA games starting in November. Again, it's not "go to the game or watch on TV", it's "watch the local team on TV or watch something else on TV".
The NFL is strongly resistant to change, and unfortunately their television policy is a relic of a bygone era. To be fair, pretty much all major sports do it this way, and it's dumb in every case. Bill Wirtz thought he could force Blackhawks fans to go to games by making them unavailable on local television, and that didn't work either.
Unfortunately, the NFL makes money hand over first, so they're very well insulated from bad decisions like these. I mean, this is a league that had two strikes in six years back in the '80s, and there's hardly any evidence of it now. (Of course, if the owners and players are stupid enough to go to a lockout in 2011, the NFL may finally make a mistake that causes pain ...) It's obvious to so many of us that a blackout doesn't do what the NFL thinks it does, but that doesn't matter. There's no room for logic at this inn.
@prag: Where are you getting the projected 100+ blackout number? There are 256 regular season games a year (32 teams times 16 games divided by 2)and the projected 20% blackout would put the number of blacked out games around 51. One thing you will notice about the list of teams in danger of blackouts is they either suck (Lions, Bengals, Cardinals (last year was a fluke, showed it Sunday), and Jags), or they have horrible stadiums (Vikings and Chargers). There's no danger of teams like the Steelers or Giants getting blacked out. Still, I don't get why the team wouldn't donate all the unsold tickets as of Saturday to charity so kids who wouldn't normally get to go to a game ever would get to see a game live.
As someone from Jacksonville, I can give a partial reason as to why these games don't sell out.
1. Our stadium is huge and this town is full of broke ass people. Yeah, there's plenty of people with money, but not enough to sell out the stadium, especially with reason number 2. the Jaguars suck. Tickets aren't cheap, and parking downtown on Game Day is like 15-20 bucks, 10 if you park in the ghetto and risk getting your car broken in to, since reason number 3. the stadium is in the ghetto.
Bottomline, as long as the Jaguars continue to be lousy, no one is going to take the risk in going to a game, or shell out the kind of money they want down there. 5 bucks for a fountain soda?! *shakes head*.
@JGKojak: I think the blackout rule has helped the NFL. Teams share TV revenue roughly equally, so a team could cheap out, have a crappy team that no one watches and still make a fortune. Other owners don't want this. Its an incentive to make the teams better. A few years ago the Bengals were well under the salary cap and other owners pressured th owners to cough up the dough to make the team better. (no amount of dollars can overcome lousy management there). Also, this gives teams incentive to put out a product that will sell out. If my team sells out, they get to put on a free 3 hour commercial of their product (their game). If they suck and don't sell out, the team gets punished by not being able to put their team on TV.
@thereij: You shouldn't try to compare an NFL stadium attendance to the Elite Division 1 College teams. Many of those teams have stadiums that dwarf the largest NFL stadiums. Plus their tickets for students are extremely cheap. If the average price for was close to the price for a NFL game I don't think there would be as much demand.
My father and I are big Cowboys fans, but we will most likely never see a game in person. We tried last year with Texas Stadium, but just waited outside in the heat forever for his friend to show up with the tickets. After paying $30 for parking two miles away.
We can't afford the new place. Seat licenses are bullshit. The Cowboys have been doing promotions that season tickets are "only $1,300!" With a $1,500 "seat license" or whatever they're calling it to try to downplay the fact that they're screwing everyone. And these are the shit seats. But it's the Cowboys, so people will pay out the arse.
I really wish something would happen to force lower prices, but at least for the Cowboys, people are crazy and that will likely never happen. Jerry Jones does it because he knows he can get away with it.
Making it hard for people to consume your product is not a way to get ahead in business. In Chicago, the Blackhawks refused to put home games on television because in the drunken mind of the owner it somehow was an affront to the season ticket holders who paid for the right (and it took away from people watching the game in the bars, where the owner made all his money anyway). The end result was that no one gave a rats ass about the Hawks for 20 years. Now they are back on TV, and they have a decent team, and people pay attention. The NFL preventing people from watching their games make no sense. If Jacksonville games are never on TV, how do you get people interested in actually going to a game? People are not going to pay a lot of money to go see something that they have no idea of the quality of the product.
With HDTV and a good sound system, watching at home is a much more enjoyable experience at home. I can piss when I want. I know exactly what the call was by the ref if something weird happpened. I can eat my own food, and not freeze to death.
This is why I have Sirius for listening to my games. There was a Ravens game last year that was blacked out in the DC market, and since I can't get DirecTV at my apartment, at least I could use the radio.
I feel bad for them...and lucky to live in a city that has been remotely close to having this issue.