The NFL must be feeling a little like Marshall Mathers. And the FCC has been nosing around enough in the league's business to make the NFL seek out a meeting with the agency responsible for the public airwaves on which a shrinking number of NFL games are televised.
Via Joe Flint of the Wall Street Journal, the NFL requested and received a meeting last week with the FCC, at a time when multiple aspects of the federal government are trying to paint a giant red "A" on the Shield.
Present at the sit-down were (among others) Hans Schroeder, who became the NFL's top media executive after Brian Rolapp grew weary of waiting for the Commissioner to retire, and FCC chairman Brendan Carr.
The meeting wasn't about whether the league has exceeded the limits of its broadcast antitrust exemption but whether, as the Wall Street Journal has previously questioned in an editorial, the NFL should still have one.
Per the report, Schroeder reiterated the league's mantra that 87 percent of the league's games are available on free TV. The obvious counter, of course, is that they all should be.
And the reality is that more of the games could land on non-FCC platforms, if the NFL's current effort to squeeze more blood from a stone-age TV model results in more games migrating to streaming platforms.
As Schroeder has said, "Facts are stubborn things." They're also easily malleable into P.R. talking points. Even if 87 percent of all games are televised at no extra cost to consumers, most of those games are clustered into the Sunday afternoon windows on CBS and Fox.
When looking at the five primary weekly windows (Thursday night, Sunday at 1:00 p.m. ET, Sunday at 4:25 p.m. ET, Sunday night, Monday night) only three of the five are consistently televised on broadcast networks. (Monday Night Football is supposed to be a cable-only property on ESPN; in recent years, more of those games have been simulcast by ABC.)
Throw in the standalone games that are landing on streaming platforms (the Week 1 international game, the Black Friday game, two Christmas games, and the coming Thanksgiving Eve game), and that total percentage of games on always-free windows dips under 60.
The mere fact that the NFL sought out the FCC for a meeting shows that the NFL is taking the situation seriously. If the NFL truly wasn’t scared of the federal government, the NFL wouldn't be scrambling to take Carr for a spin.
That's the key takeaway, in our view. The unflappable NFL is flapping. Political pressure is mounting. Consumer discontent is growing. Even if the NFL will emerge from this episode without changes to the way it sells games to networks and streamers, the league realizes that there may be limits to the endless salad bowl of cash.