Darkness is Spreading

I was happy to see ESPN's Tim Keown shed light on the most dastardly, yet low-profile rule in sports: The NFL blackout policy. This has been on my mind for several weeks and I have a strong feeling that the issue will blow up into a major story this fall.

The league's policy is that if a game is not sold out within 72 hours of kickoff, the game is blacked out on all TV sets within 75 miles of the stadium. As harsh as that sounds, the blackout rule was even worse in the past: prior to 1973, all NFL games were blacked out in the home market, regardless of whether the game sold out. Yes, even the Super Bowl used to be blacked out in the host city.

While the rule was originally implemented to help owners maximize ticket sales and gameday revenue, the NFL blackout is hopelessly outdated. The idea that fans in Oakland with Sunday Ticket on their HDTVs are going to leap off their couches and head to the stadium to watch JaMarcus Russell live is simplistic at best and insulting at worst. The blackouts are more likely to exacerbate the attendance problem, since embittered local fans at home are deprived of the product and can't develop as strong a bond with the team. When the fans can't see the atmosphere of their home team's crowd, they literally don't know what they're missing by staying home.

The problem is only going to get worse this year, with ticket sales sufffering due to the slow economy. This is going to sneak up as a major issue once the season starts, as more and more NFL markets will face blackouts throughout the season. In Keown's article, an NFL spokesman maintains that the policy ain't broke, so the league won't fix it, economy be damned. This is a perfect example of institutional inertia at its worst: If Roger Goodell (or anyone for that matter) were starting a sports league today, is there any chance that they would create a blackout policy? Goodell needs to recognize that this recession is the perfect opportunity to rid the league of the most archaic, punitive, short-sighted policy in all of sports.