Rocky's Football Corner #15

by Rick Rockwell

After a few political shoves, the National Football League (NFL) decided this week to play Santa instead of Scrooge when it comes to college football.

To the uninitiated, the NFL has more than a draft day stake in college athletics and this year that expanded when the league’s cable network obtained the rights to two college bowl games. NFL Network executives have admitted this was all to get more cable television carriage of the network. Currently, only about 40 percent of homes in the country can see the league’s network.

What was at stake was whether viewers in New Jersey and New York could see Rutgers play in the Texas Bowl, against Kansas State. (The other bowl game is the Insight Bowl between Texas Tech and Minnesota.) As footnoted last week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and other politicians have asked the NFL not to disenfranchise Rutgers’ fans as a way to gain advantage in the league’s disputes with cable television.

As this column has discussed, (see #11 and #12) the monopoly of professional football is colliding with the cartel of cable operators over how the league’s network should be displayed. The league wants all cable viewers to see the network. The cable cartel wants to impose extra costs on viewers because the NFL is charging more for the channel, due to its exclusive rights to Thursday and Saturday NFL games. The fans/consumers are the victim in this power struggle of corporate titans. The NFL is producing an exclusive product and making billions from it in television rights, and thus the games it now reserves for its own cable channel have growing value. Meanwhile, the cable cartel resents being leveraged for more cash by the league. The NFL says don’t charge fans more for this, so the cable operators should swallow all of the expense for additional rights. The cable operators say that isn’t the corporate way and someone needs to pay. In this case, in their view, maybe only sports fans who want the games should pay for the NFL as a premium channel.

So this week, the NFL announced that some of the cable companies in New York and New Jersey that weren’t carrying the network could have it for free during Christmas week. What a nice gift, right?

Well, the cable cartel sees this gift as a Trojan horse. Once the NFL Network is on, consumers/fans will want it all the time.

One of the cable operators, Cablevision, has agreed to take the free programming, but Time Warner Cable, which has led the fight against the league, may only take the programming with conditions. One of those conditions was just programming the Rutgers bowl appearance and not showing the rest of the league’s programming.

It isn’t like the league’s gift doesn’t come with strings too: although the league will allow the cable operators to have the college games and other programming for free, the league’s games set for the network that week still won’t be available until a final deal is worked out with the cable operators. So one might say Time Warner’s response is appropriate.

No, it is just more corporate greed. One of Time Warner’s other proposals was to take the free NFL programming and make that available on a premium channel. So let me get this straight: the cable company gets something free for a week and then it turns around and decides to charge consumers/fans extra for the programming these corporate pirates are getting for nothing. How fair is that?

Some may think that while the wily NFL looks like Santa in this public relations battle, the cable cartel ends up looking like the Grinch. The NFL’s motives are certainly motivated by money too, but the league continues to outmaneuver the cable cartel in the court of public opinion.

For example, some consumers have gone beyond mere complaints and are now distributing an internet petition to get Time Warner and other firms to negotiate a deal and stop depriving fans.

One can only hope they will resolve this issue soon so all NFL fans can see all the games. Maybe if we are lucky, that’ll happen by Christmas, but don’t count on it.

cable television
nfl
football
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