NFL’s Patriots-Giants Game Gets Help From Congress
NEW YORK — To pro football fans who live outside the Boston and New York metropolitan countries, it must look as if Santa Claus milled around later this twelvemonth or acquired an super early start on next Christmas.
That’s because the National Football League’s telecasting network has determined to open up up Saturday night’s momentous New England Patriots-New York Giants game to a national hearing over “free” telecasting networks.
Primitively, the game was alleged to be presented exclusively on the NFL Network or on local TV in and about Boston and New York. Job is, most of America doesn’t have got at to the NFL Network. Consorting to a public opinion poll by AOL Sports, only 32% of answerers said they have it.
“We have occupied this the step because it is in the best interest of our fans,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell expressed in an insistence release.
Yea, right. And that was Goodell hurrying down your lamp chimney on Christmas Eve.
With this move, the NFL is moving in its own opportunism. It doesn’t want to bestir the congressional sleeping giant, that could perplex the league’s power to negociate billion-dollar telecasting contracts. Even if every officeholder from Maine to Long Island occupied the recognition, Congress made a better job of seeming out for sports fans than the NFL.
If the NFL gave care so much about its fans, it wouldn’t have stopped dead out so a lot of by debut the web in the first place. The originators behind the NFL Network must figure this game is whied God excogitated the athletics bar.
Objects
The Patriots-Giants contest will be airy on NBC, that is had by General Electric , and CBS in improver to the NFL Network, fashioning this the first NFL game to be transported by three TV channel. The first Super Bowl, played on Jan. 15, 1967 and acquired by Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, was airy by both CBS and NBC.
We can reason out that the NFL, one of the savviest and most successful sports business organizations in the world, felted up that it held little choice in the Patriots-Giants broadcast. The relocation accomplishes a few important objectives spell affording the NFL an chance to arrogate a big public relations victory in the optic of unworldly people.
In the main, however, the conclusion deflects — for this pro football game season, at any rate — the unwished possibility that the U.S. US Congress would put pressure on the NFL. The last affair the NFL wants is for Congress, faced with an election year, to look into the league’s antimonopoly exemption when it talks terms TV packages with the webs.
The NFL Network has a mere 43 000 000 endorsers. Because NBC and CBS will use the NFL’s spreaders, the league’s military operation will get some painfully needed vulnerability.
A few hebdomads ago, the NFL earned some heavy unfavorable judgment when the Dallas Cowboys-Green Bay Packers game, one of the regular season’s pavilion events, was airy only on the NFL Network. Now, the NFL will doubtlessly try to convert America that it is demoing the game crosswise the state in the flavour of vacation giving — or something like that, I guess.
The Patriots-Giants hit highlights the final weekend of the NFL’s regular season, and it has genuined historic entailments. The Patriots will go in Giants Stadium retention a 15-0 record, the first time an NFL team has maintained that mark. The squad is heavilied favored to vanquish the Giants and reason out its regular season with an undefeated record. The 1972 Miami Dolphins locomoted undefeated in 1972, but made so in a 14-game schedule.
The NFL’s black 2007
On the former hand, the NFL has had got a black season and for certain craved a PR boost. Among former troubling off-the-field cases, the problems of Michael Vick, the former star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, discredited the league’s unity.
Not so long ago, Vick was far as one of the NFL’s most magnetic young famous persons, and he was besides a favorite on Madison Avenue. But he was shunned by the Falcons and suspended by the NFL for his part in a worthless dog-fighting ring. He was lately sentenced to 23 calendar months in federal prison house.
Yes, the NFL needs a PR triumph. But don’t be gulled into believing that it has evolved a sudden case of selflessness. This is pured self-interest at work. It’s named good concern.
MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Who has your back as an athletics fan: the NFL or Congress?
Fri STORY OF THE WEEK: “The Top Player in This League? It May Be the Sports Reporter” by Richard Perez-Pena (New York Times, Dec. 24). With reports that Disney’s ESPN is courting sports diary keepers with recompense offers of 100s of grands of one dollar bills a twelvemonth, I can only hope that it’s a thing of clip before culture mediums columnists get our turn in the Sun!
READERS RESPOND to my chromatography column on Jose Canseco: “Jon: I’ve existed around this concern long enough to cognise that I’m non going to alter your mind, but your blanket depiction of athletics writers is unfortunated, and the thought that Jose Canseco ’scooped’ anybody in the traditional sense was but wrong. First, yes, there are sports authors just like you depict. There are as well a mass of genuinely good newspersons and authors who go on to indite sports. Second, there existed only two slipways a monumental story on sex hormones in baseball game was travelling to be reported: 1) Effectual proceedings that brought forth paper (BALCO and the grand panel) and that paper acquiring released or leaked out (as with the Chronicle) or 2) someone with inside noesis of steroid hormone use (Canseco) penning about it. Absent that, there was moving to be no easy found paper trail to postdate, nobody locomoting on the platter (or off it for that matter) — no hard evidence on that to establish reporting.”
Craig Stanke
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