Don’t be scared to read this article about how Blackouts came to be in the NFL!You know football is back full bore when the talk of the week is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers home game against the New England Patriots will be blacked out for the Bucs home area, and that according to the Glazers, most of the Bucs home regular season games will probably be blacked out too; with some hope for two nationally televised contests against the Indianapolis Colts on Monday Night Football and the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday Night fooball. The radio waves have been filling up with angry fans crying foul because Raymond James is a City Investment Tax Stadium and as such, taxpayers have a ‘right’ to view their tax dollars at work. Then more fans that have been season ticket holders for decades yelling at fans to come out and support the team or they are a disgrace. Then my personal favorites are the callers or commentors who somehow find a way to blame the lockout on the Glazers, that they could end it if they really wanted to.
Neither one of these positions could be further from the truth than the other, and in fact, most people do not even know the truth about the Blackout rule, where it comes from, how it was originated, or whom it was designed to protect. Answer this trivia question; which party was the NFL Blackout rule designed to protect?
- A) The NFL Team
- B) The Team’s Fans
- C) The NFL Owners.
The answer, and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, are after the READ MORE break, and they may surprise you.
Before I will tell you the answer, a fact that only about 50% of people who comment on websites or call in on radio shows seem to know. The United States Congress controls the NFL Blackout rule. Not the National Football League. The Commissioner of the NFL is completely helpless to do anything about the Blackouts, because the whole thing is not so much a rule, as it is a LAW!
OK, to wet your whistle, here is the answer.
B– You, the FANS, are the protected party in the current NFL Blackout legistlation.
Now pull your Jaw back up, and read on for how this came to morph into what it is now.
The Blackout Policy finds its origins back to 1951, when the then Los Angeles Rams showed all of their games on local Television in 1949 and saw a sharp decrease in attendance from the year before. NFL Commissioner Bert Bell decided to take action, and the NFL banned a team’s home games from appearing on TV. Of course whenever anything like that happens, a court challenge ensues, and in 1953 Federal Judge Allan Grim upheld the blackout policy. This only worked because back then each individual team negotiated its own individual deals with their local TV Stations.
That ended in 1961 when Commissioner Pete Rozelle struck a collective deal for the league with CBS. The NFL then filed a petition with Judge Grim who ruled the collective deal was a restraint of trade. The situation was a mess..and who makes a bigger mess of a mess while trying to clean it up? CONGRESS! President John F Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 which said that anit-trust laws do not apply to sports leagues selling collective broadcasting rights. This was also the origin of laws that prevented the telecasting of NFL games on Friday or Saturdays in competition with College and High School football games.
Now at this point your saying… HUH? WHAT? Things were in our favor right? Well, no. You see Owners felt that it was good to broadcast all the away games, but you should NEVER broadcast a home game, EVEN if it sold out a long time ago. Why? Because if you televise home games, then people would wait before they bought their season or individual tickets, to wait and see if it would be a sell out or not. Owners didnt want fans to hold out on them, but rather buy up their tickets as soon or as fast as possible, so owners refused to put home games on TV.
Congress stepped in, and rescued the fans. In 1973, the current NFL Blackout rule was created, enforcing a blackout of home games on network telecasts, but ONLY if the game did not sell out within 72 hours of kickoff. Congress was saving the fans, by FORCING the owners to broadcast a home game, IF the fans would buy all the tickets within 3 days of the game!
As strange as it sounds, the Current NFL Blackout rule was designed to protect us fans! Somehow, it has since changed and morphed into what it is now. Alot has changed since 1973 and 2011. We have mass media, the Internet, Hulu, Slingbox, NFL.com Game rewind, Satelite/Cable, Sirius/XM Radio, and more! Perhaps even more important, the Stadiums themselves have changed, with Club Seats, Mezzanine seating, Luxury boxes and more, supplemental income that pushes to the unthinkable the need for NFL Owners to sell out a stadium 72 hours before kickoff. It may be interesting to note, that in 1978, studies showed season ticket sales league-wide were down 14% since the 1973 law went into effect.
This artwork adored the cover of a 1978 St. Pete Times newspaper, announcing Culverhouse’s deed.Perhaps some more information that may blow your mind, the two ownership groups that have ever owned the Bucs, have also been two of the groups that have pushed the Blackout rules to their furthest exent. Perhaps no one did this to a greater disregard and slap in the face to NFL Ownership than the Bucs late owner Hugh Culverhouse. He infuriated late Miami Dophins owner Joe Robbie when he authorized the local telecast of a Last minute Sell-Out preseason battle between the Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, without receiving permission from Robbie to do so.
Because ticket sales are shared between visitors, It was customary to get the visiting team’s permission, but mind you when I say customary, I mean the permission part, because only NETWORK broadcasts of games were covered under these rules. At the time preseason games did not belong to any network package, so the rule did not apply to them. Owners could do what they wanted. Culverhouse wanted the Bay area fans to get caught up in the atmosphere of professional football now that they had their own team, going up against what was once Miami Dolphin territory when they were the only team bay area fans rooted for only a few years prior. Culverhouse put Robbie on the spot, a position he did not appriciate. The end result, Robbie ceased Miami vs Tampa Bay preseason battles for almost a decade! This hurt Culverhouse more, ‘Miami at Tampa Bay’ was a huge draw at the Big Sombrero, not so much vice versa.
30 years later, the Glazers found themselves in the middle of scrutiny with bloggers and some in the media who criticized how the Bucs owners managed to get Tampa Bay Buccaneers games past the blackout rules when visibly tens of thousands of fans were not in the stands during the 2009 season. No one has ever really figured out how they did it, but Tampa Bay fans got to ‘enjoy’ Raymond James football without the games being sold out. And its probably this effort that causes some to feel the Glazers somehow ‘owe’ the fans each year to do this. They do not.
The NFL does not control the Blackout rule, nor do the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The rule is in the hands of Congress, who ultimately are in the hands of the people. It should be noted that among the rules that come up the most often for change in congress, The Blackout Policy of 1973 is among the most each year.
Sources:
St.Pete Times; Hubert Mizell- Aug 18th, 1978
Ron Martz; Aug 13, 1979
Buffalonews.com; Mark Gaughan- October 21, 2010
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