[Jets Vs Patriots Live Stream: How To Watch Today’s NFL Football From Anywhere
Oludare Padilla
The NFL maintained a blackout policy, from 1973 through 2014, that stated that a home game cannot be televised in the team's local market if 85 percent of the tickets are not sold out 72 hours before the starting time of the match. This makes the NFL the only major professional sports league in the US that requires teams to sell out tickets in order to broadcast a game on television locally. Nationally televised games in the other leagues often are blacked out on the national networks on which the game is airing in the local markets of the participating teams. Those games still can be seen on the local broadcast television station or regional sports network that normally holds their local/regional broadcast rights. The NFL's blackout policy has been suspended on a year-to-year basis since 2015.[1][2][3][4][5]
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The earliest NFL television blackout policy blacked out all broadcasts on radio and television of any games in the home city of origin and on any TV stations located within 75 miles (121 km) of the team's home city, regardless of whether they were sold out, during those time periods when the teams were playing at home. Teams were also allowed to restrict home-market stations from broadcasting games in other markets during the times they were playing away games broadcast live in their home market. Even if they gave their approval for a telecast or broadcast they might otherwise have been able to permit, the NFL commissioner was still required to approve it, and did not need to give an explanation.[7]
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against the league over these provisions. The NFL argued that the antitrust exemption for professional baseball and recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court applied to it; Judge Allan Kuhn Grim of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania declined to reach that question, holding that since antitrust law clearly applied to radio and television it applied in the instant case as well, and granted an injunction barring all those practices save the restriction on outside-market game broadcasts during home games.[7]
The Supreme Court later rejected the NFL's claim to the same antitrust exemption as baseball.[8] Thus, in 1961, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, granting football and other professional team sports an exemption from antitrust law allowing them to negotiate television contracts as leagues and not individual teams.[9]
Until 1973, league policy resulted in home-city blackouts even during sold-out regular-season games and championship games. For instance, the 1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants was unavailable to viewers in the New York City market despite the sellout at Yankee Stadium (many fans rented hotel rooms or visited friends in areas of Connecticut or Pennsylvania where signals of TV stations carrying the game were available to watch the game on television, a practice that continued for Giants games through 1972). Similarly, all Super Bowl games prior to Super Bowl VII in January 1973 were not televised in the host city's market.
A 1970 game between the Giants and New York Jets at Shea Stadium was broadcast in New York by WCBS-TV when the Jets agreed to lift the blackout to allow Giants fans to view the game live. Later that season, when the San Francisco 49ers visited the Oakland Raiders, Raiders owner Al Davis enforced the blackout in the Bay Area to the considerable anger of CBS, the 49ers and fans of both teams.
Rozelle agreed to lift the blackout for Super Bowl VII on an "experimental basis", if the game sold-out ten or more days in advance. With the game a sellout, viewers in the Los Angeles area were able to see the NBC telecast of the game. Nonetheless, Congress intervened before the 1973 season anyway, passing Public Law 93-107, sponsored by Democratic U.S. Representative Torbert MacDonald of Massachusetts (signed by Nixon on September 14, 1973, two days before the start of the regular season), which eliminated the blackout of games in the home market so long as the game was sold out by 72 hours before game time.[12] The league will sometimes change this deadline to 48 hours if there are only a few thousand tickets left to be sold; much more rarely, the NFL will occasionally reduce the deadline to 24 hours in special cases, such as a very low number of tickets (less than 1,000) remaining with 48 hours left, or the intervention of holidays during the 72 and/or 48 hour deadlines.[13]
Unsold tickets allocated to visiting teams, as well as all seats located in premium club sections and luxury suites have been excluded from the blackout rule. Modern NFL stadiums have reduced general seating in favor of club seating and luxury suites, as this makes it easier to sell out the stadium and avoid blackouts. Revenue from premium club seating and luxury suites does not have to be shared with other franchises. Alternatively, some NFL teams have arrangements with local television stations or businesses (often sponsors of the team and/or its local broadcasts) to purchase unsold tickets. Teams themselves are allowed to purchase remaining non-premium tickets at 34 on the dollar (the portion subject to revenue sharing) to prevent a blackout.[14][15] Teams can also lift the blackout on their own; this has occasionally been done in cases of stormy weather on game days.
The NFL requires that closing off sections be done uniformly for every home game, including playoff games, in a given season. This prevents teams from trying to sell out the entire stadium only when they expect to be able to do so. For instance, the Jacksonville Jaguars closed off a number of sections at their home stadium, EverBank Field, to reduce the number of tickets they would need to sell. EverBank Field is one of the largest venues in the NFL, as it was built to also accommodate the annual Florida-Georgia game and Gator Bowl in college football, and was expanded for Super Bowl XXXIX, even though it draws from one of the smallest markets in the league.
Ultimately, no games would be blacked out at all during the 2014 season.[21] On March 23, 2015, the NFL's owners voted to suspend the blackout rules for the 2015 NFL season, meaning that all games would be televised in their home markets, regardless of ticket sales.[21] The suspension continued into the 2016 season; commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the league needed to further investigate the impact of removing the blackout rules before such a change is made permanent.[22] While the league never explicitly stated such, the blackout suspension continued into 2017.[23]
The NFL defines a team's market area as "local" if it is within a 75-mile (121 km) radius of the team's home stadium. Therefore, a blackout affects any market where the terrestrial broadcast signal of an affiliate station, under normal conditions, penetrates into the 75-mile radius. These affiliates are determined before the season, and do not change as the season progresses. Some remote primary media markets, such as Denver and Phoenix, may cover that entire radius, so that the blackout would not affect any other affiliates. However, in some instances, a very tiny portion of a distant city's market area can be within the 75-mile radius of a different city, therefore leading to blackouts well beyond the targeted area.
The most notable example is the blackout of Buffalo Bills games within the Syracuse, New York market because a small section of the town of Italy in Yates County, containing a handful of people, lies within the 75-mile radius of Highmark Stadium (a stadium that has failed to sell out numerous times, though not exclusively due to the Bills playing record; these sell-out failures usually occur due to the harsh winter weather the area receives on the shores of Lake Erie and fans choosing not to commute to Orchard Park for their safety or by municipal orders) while the entirety of the remainder of the Syracuse market lies outside of it. Yates County was previously part of the Syracuse DMA (Designated Market Area), but it was later transferred into the Rochester DMA because of exurb expansion with an increasing number of employees working in the immediate Rochester area living in Yates County and traveling to Rochester for events. Despite this, the league still enforced Bills blackouts for Syracuse and, because the Mohawk Valley did not have a CBS affiliate of its own and relied on Syracuse CBS affiliate WTVH to cover that area, the Mohawk Valley DMA as well (despite the fact that no part of that area comes remotely close to the 75-mile threshold); because of this, the Bills' blackout radius extended hundreds of miles beyond the actual stadium, well into Herkimer County. (In 2015, the DT2 subchannel of Utica's NBC affiliate WKTV affiliated with CBS, ending the Mohawk Valley's blackouts; should the blackout rule be reimposed, that market will no longer face blackouts.)
The NFL does allow in some cases for secondary markets to extend beyond the 75 mile radius in part to help draw fans to attend the game. Some of these exceptions are in Charlotte, North Carolina, where many of its secondary markets lie outside the 75 mile radius (Greensboro and Raleigh). Others include Los Angeles, primarily due to San Diego (116 miles (187 km) from Los Angeles) not having had an NFL team since the 2017 move of the Chargers to Los Angeles.
Similarly, no Super Bowl has ever been unavailable in the market of origin since Super Bowl VII in 1973. Every Super Bowl except the first has been a sellout, and, with the game's high-profile status, a television blackout never will happen.
Another policy to encourage sellouts has been that no other NFL game can air opposite the local franchise's broadcast on the primary market's affiliate due to NFL rules or due to a blackout, with the exception of Week 17. The NFL relaxed this restriction beginning in 2019, allowing a station to air a game opposite the local home team up to two times. The following year, the NFL doubled the number to four, owing largely to the COVID-19 pandemic limiting the number of fans in attendance but also difficulty for viewers in New York City and Los Angeles to see many games outside of the two teams in each market (Giants/Jets and Chargers/Rams respectively) as one would be in town most weeks.[24]
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