LET THEM eat frozen cake!
As the NFL’s playoffs have increasingly become prime-time programming, it’s worth noting that the league was once in the habit of smugly poking fun at baseball and the NBA for creating a postseason dictated by primetime TV money factors.
The NFL’s sotto voce message that it would never do such a fan-unfriendly thing – that it would never risk losing kids from its TV base during its postseason nor make ticket-buyers suffer through winter weather in the dead of night – is no longer spoken, not even in a whisper.
Yesterday, the Falcons played the Packers. At night. On Jan. 4th. In Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Colts played at the Jets, a 4:30 start. In January, that’s a night game. But later starts make better Coast-to-Coast ratings. Same time schedule this coming Saturday.
The NFL is eager to have its partner networks reap the benefits of prime-time ad revenues – and lessen their losses on their NFL deals. And when TV comes first, fans, especially loyal ticket buyers, invariably come last.
And it’s not as if the NFL doesn’t know other residual scores, as well. It knows, all too well, how night games turn in-house drunks a lot drunker and a lot more inclined toward incivility, including violence.
And so, the NFL’s TV-driven formula – the better your team, the greater the hardship to attend games or even to watch them on TV until their conclusion – worsens.
It used to be that if your team had a good season, you’d suffer the next season. Some or many of your team’s fall/winter daylight home games -those beginning at 1 p.m. – would, in the next season, be lost to higher-rated 4 p.m. games, Sunday nighters and Monday nighters.
That formula remains, but now the punishment for success is more immediate: In the same season that a patron’s team makes the playoffs, he or she risks having to attend a night playoff game in January.
And that formula relates to a broader one: To be an active, ticket-buying, devoted, sports fan, today, it really helps to be an idiot. It really does.