The season’s second-biggest story started off the weekend’s NFL action on Thursday night when Brett Favre — in the midst of an amazing late-career surge — and the Green Bay Packers faced the Dallas Cowboys — whose young quarterback, Tony Romo, grew up in Wisconsin idolizing Favre. Both teams were 10-1, the best in the NFC, and both teams are steeped in NFL history.
Just a few years ago, all any football fan would have needed to enjoy both these games was a TV set and, maybe, a simple antenna. “Monday Night Football” was on ABC until last season. NFC matchups such as the Packers-Cowboys showdown were always, until the advent of ESPN’s Sunday night games in 1987, on Fox or, before that, CBS. In short: Football was free.
These days, we know better. Tonight’s Patriots game is on ESPN, which is in its second season carrying “Monday Night Football.” Thursday’s Packers-Cowboys game was on NFL Network, which has a much smaller presence on cable systems around the country.
Maybe it’s conditioning — becoming so accustomed to looking to ESPN for our nightly sports highlights and recognizing ESPN’s affinity for excellent game coverage — but football fans nowadays pretty much expect to pay for at least some part of their season’s viewing schedule.
In the last two seasons, however, the NFL seems to be in experimental mode. The league appears to be testing the limits of both its fans’ patience and their willingness to pay for what they used to get for free. For millions of cable viewers around the country, the NFL also has devised a scheme whereby it can profit not just from die-hard football fans, but from all cable subscribers, regardless of whether they know a football from a flowerpot.
The test tubes in the last experiment bubbled over on Thursday night, when football-loving customers of some of the biggest cable companies, such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Charter Communications, found themselves out of luck if they wanted to see the biggest NFC matchup of the season. NFL Network insists that it must be placed on basic service tiers, available to every customer, and not just on a sports-specific digital tier. The league wants the cable companies to pay it 70 cents per customer per month for NFL Network, which this season carries eight games, including next Thursday’s Bears-Washington game. It may not seem like much, but 70 cents is more than most cable channels charge carriers.
Springfield cable customers who are also football fans are lucky. Insight Communications carries NFL Network in its digital package. It’s part of a $12 tier that also includes dozens of other channels catering to a wide variety of interests. Likewise, Comcast customers in Chicago can get NFL Network on an all-sports tier for $6.99 a month. To us, that seems like the fairest solution given the current setup.
But we wonder how long football fans will accept the current setup. We may not have thought about it much, but we’ve all been making the NFL rich for 20 years, thanks to ESPN. Those cable increases we pay every year can be attributed in part to the huge money ESPN (and to a lesser extent other cable networks like Fox Sports, TBS and TNT) have shelled out to professional sports leagues. Now the NFL has decided to cut out the middleman and keep all the money.
NFL Network has launched a campaign — iwantmynflnetwork.com — aimed at inducing football fans to bully cable companies into thinking its way. We’re siding with the cable companies on this one. Fans need to know when they are being manipulated and who is doing the manipulating. In this case, it’s the NFL.
