Callous NFL Sticks It to Main Street

They started playing night games. They gave away groceries. They held something they called "mortgage nights" to help folks who were having a tough time meeting their monthly housing obligation.

But the one thing baseball's bosses during the Great Depression refused to do was give away more of their games on radio.

They finally came to the conclusion that, depression notwithstanding, they would do nothing drastic in the way of retrenchments that would seriously affect baseball's time-honored customers or, as one owner expressed it, 'cheapen' the game," John Drebinger of the New York Times reported during baseball's winter meetings in 1932.

The economy eventually recovered and baseball thrived once more. There were no hard feelings from its fans who may have felt the national pastime could have been a little more forgiving by letting them hear over the radio their favorite teams they couldn't afford to see for the moment in person.

I suspect the bosses of our national pastime these days, the NFL, aren't ignorant of that lesson, otherwise they wouldn't be holding on to their blackout rule during these particularly tough economic times with a grip only Fred Biletnikoff with all his Stickum could appreciate.

It certainly would be a nice gesture if the NFL, which kicked off this season Thursday night in Pittsburgh, would let the estimated dozen teams struggling to sell out their home games broadcast those home games locally and let the folks who can't afford to be there in person watch from their sofas, if they haven't sold them. A measurement called The Fan Cost Index calculates the average cost of taking a family of four to an NFL game as $412.64. Ten teams cost that family even more.

Relaxing the blackout rule would go in lock step with some things some teams already have done to lessen the load on their fans. Most teams didn't raise ticket prices this season and a couple, like the lousy Lions, lowered them. (The Lions should actually be paying fans to come watch, but that's another issue.)

It would be even nicer if the NFL borrowed a page from the British Open and Tiger Woods' tournament in the nation's capital and let kids in for free. What would that hurt to give a few kids free seats if you can't sell the seats anyway? Or maybe some still rich benevolent business person in a blackout-threatened market can step up and buy the bulk of tickets and give them to some at-risk kids or out-of-work folks who could really appreciate the moment. That would save the game from a blackout, too.

The league's refusal to suspend its blackout rule this season, however, should remind every fan that gets angry when his or her team's Brandon Marshall has a hissy fit over money that the players that appear so selfish are just reflecting the league's greed. After all, the league between last season and 2011 will take in $11.6 billion from its broadcasters. It could certainly afford to cut its suffering markets some slack this one year. The TV money is already in the bank.

"This seems rather inappropriate in the current economy in that almost every stadium design in the last 20 years has sought to eliminate the everyday fan and charge half as many people [corporate clients] twice as much," Vanderbilt economics professor and former Kansas State football player John Vrooman told me Thursday evening.

At least baseball's bosses back during the depression had a legitimate excuse for keeping games off the radio, despite that radio had helped generate interest and income for minor-league teams. Ticket sales were baseball's main source of revenue, which is why one thing baseball owners did then to make ends meet was pit stars from its segregated league against Negro Leagues' players in an effort to sell ducats to black and white crowds. In the NFL, it's TV contracts that pack the coffer. The league has been blacking out games locally that don't sell out since 1973.

"The NFL was the most aggressive at cultivating television in the sixties," Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and past president of the North American Association of Sports Economists pointed out to me Thursday afternoon. "Those owners were visionaries and they were right."

That may be the irony in all of this. The NFL nurtured a symbiotic economic relationship with television but won't cut TV a break when it could use it as well.

As such, a few people have suggested that the NFL is acting in a manner that bites the hand that feeds it.

"My worry is that if the NFL doesn't look at changing the rule, we're losing a fan base," Richard Clark, president of the Jacksonville City Council where Jaguars' fans are facing blackouts, told Time magazine this week. "I would like to think they would really, really look at those communities which are hardest hit and have an honest discussion about it, as opposed to saying this is the way we've always done things."

I think the NFL is just acting greedily. The most sympathy it is showing is by not holding teams to the 72-hour deadline for selling out before the blackout rule is enforced. That's what it did for Cincinnati this weekend. The league should come up with a more heartfelt audible than that and give its fans a break.

"If the teams are so eager to raise ticket prices after good seasons and willing to replace regular hard-core fans with corporate clients in club seats and fancy luxury boxes, then why don't they cut ticket prices in a recession?" Vrooman wondered.

The NFL offered a newfangled solution for fans in markets where blackouts may occur: NFL.com will re-broadcast the games for free starting at midnight after the games. How nice is that? If you can stay up on the last night before the traditional workweek starts and don't mind squinting at your computer screen for three hours, you can watch your home team that was blacked out.

Of course, if you can't afford to fall asleep on the job because so many others would be happy to have it, and you cut back on Internet service to save a little dough, then you're just out of luck, again.