Monetize This...

Here is one time being a Time Warner customer is a benefit. No access to the NFL Network.

Because of an on-going pissing match with the NFL over the value of its in-house network, Time Warner cable customers have been spared any temptation to lose valuable minutes and hours that they’ll never get back by watching the NFL Network instead of doing almost anything else.

The problem isn’t the programming, per se. Rather the problem stems from the fact that the network’s very existence encourages the NFL to exploit any and every aspect of its operations. Meanwhile, the NFL’s other partners, like ESPN, feel the heat that an in-house network with a built-in advantage creates and respond accordingly. The outcome is a nearly incoherent yet endless bombardment of programming that provides plenty of analysis with little if any actual information.

Between ESPN and the NFL Network, more hours have been devoted to answering the question about Tim Tebow’s future than had been given to understanding the Apollo Moon Walk, the Nixon/Watergate scandal and the recent health care reform debate, combined.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but far less of one than half of those made by a growing phalanx of so-called analysts whose only qualification seems to have been their singular ability to retire from the NFL before suffering one too many concussions. As for Mel Kiper, Jr., about the only thing worth admiring is his singular ability to turn nerdism and bad hair into a full time, fairly lucrative vocation.

What these two networks, as well as their wannabe little brothers at networks like Sports Time Ohio, really have done is find a way to monetize conversations previously reserved for the local bars. And yet it’s almost the least offensive thing they do.

The most offensive would be, of course, the so-called NFL schedule show on ESPN Tuesday night. If it didn’t exist you’d think I was making it up. The NFL is too stately of an operation to merely release its schedule anymore like every other professional sports league. It needs a grand entrance complete with even more meaningless analysis.

Virtually any conclusion one might want to reach about their team’s schedule can’t be gleaned in late April. It is often less important who a team plays or where than it is when and when isn’t just a function of the time of year. Some teams are quick starters others take time to find their stride.

A few seasons ago the Cleveland Browns opened against the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys came out of training camp clicking and the Browns were absolutely no match for them. Yet several weeks later those same Cowboys were mostly a mess and much less formidable.

Then there’s always the difficulty in predicting the difficulty of next year’s schedule based on the previous season’s records of the teams you’ll be playing. Sure, you can pretty much conclude that the Browns will win maybe two of their 6 division games but that’s just an annoying constant. But will Kansas City again be the dregs of the league given the significant upgrades they’ve made in their personnel and coaching staff? Will New Orleans again play like they own the league?

Each season tends to take on its own personality and it often is far different from that of the previous season. All of this combines to tell me that irrespective of how much the NFL likes to exploit its product, the average fan would know just as much now if the league had simply released the schedule to the media like it used to do.

Falling somewhere between draft previews and schedule releases on the distraction schedule is the draft itself. In true NFL fashion, an event that was already more boring than a Browns preseason game against the Lions has been made even more so by dragging it out over three days instead of two.

You think there is dead time in the average hour of American Idol? Wait until the NFL draft is conducted over three days starting on Thursday. The first round, with the 15 minutes allotted to each team to make a decision they’ve been pondering for months, lasts twice as long as The English Patient, heretofore the benchmark of tedium.

It starts at 7:30 p.m. which means that somewhere around midnight the last of the first round will finish up. For those precious few that haven’t fallen asleep yet, both ESPN and the NFL Network promise to increase the dosage on their broadcast sleeping pills by spending all remaining moments until Friday evening analyzing the “winners” and “losers” of that first round, as if that were even possible.

Perhaps to garner more attention for the even less scintillating second and third rounds, ESPN is broadcasting them on Friday night. If you think watching your team draft a non-descript offensive tackle in the first round fails to quicken the pulse wait until your team spends the next two rounds finding hidden gems like Mohamad Massaquoi and Chaun Thompson.

Then, of course, its on to Saturday’s run-up to the real point of it all, finding Mr. Irrelevant a.k.a. the last player drafted. With just 7 rounds, Mr. Irrelevant isn’t nearly as Irrelevant as he used to be, yet his chances of sticking in the NFL are only slightly better than Jerry Rice’s chances of actually becoming a competitive professional golfer or, stated differently, exactly the same as Michael Jordan’s chances were of becoming a competitive professional baseball player.

What the NFL seems to have absolutely no concern over is the saturation of their product. There can never be too much of the NFL, according to commission Roger Goodell. That’s why we get made-for-TV events like the announcement of the schedule, not to mention “reality” shows like Hard Knocks on HBO, a really bizarre concept when you consider that professional sports has always been the ultimate reality show.

I’d like to think we’ve reached the outer limits of the NFL’s hubris and the public’s ability to fund it, but I know better. What I don’t know is where the NFL takes this next.

If the NFL wanted to have a show that went in depth on the finances of each team, that might be something actually worth watching. If the NFL could partner with MSNBC on weekends and follow the legal exploits of dirt bags like Ben Roethlisberger as they try to wriggle out of legal jams by throwing money at desperate college girls, that might be worth watching as well. Heck, it would be great programming if they filmed Goodell’s meetings with troubled players like Roethlisberger or Santonio Holmes.

I suspect, though, that none of that is forthcoming. Instead the logical extension of the NFL’s march toward world domination is a longer season featuring more teams and a Super Bowl that’s played at the end of March. That way the off-season would really be about 6-weeks long.

In a way, that would be a welcome change. Anything to limit further the broadcast time afforded to Mel Kiper, Jr. can only be a positive.

Specter vs. Goodell, Again

What’s the sound made by one hand clapping? Probably the same as the one generated by the majority of football fans over Sen. Arlen Specter’s continued grandstanding on the so-called Spygate matter.

This past week, golf pro Matt Walsh, the former videographer for the New England Patriots, emerged from his Hawaiian hideway to spill whatever beans were left to spill about his taping escapades to, in order, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Specter, the New York Times and HBO. Next week, he’s due to meet with Virgil, the maintenance man in my building.

Of course, Walsh didn’t really have anything new to say, except that he unwittingly made the Boston Globe look even more foolish (no small feat) by denying that the Patriots had secretly taped the St. Louis Rams’ pre-Super Bowl walk-through. In short order, he did confirm what had already been known and offered his thoughts on the ethics of it all after, of course, compromising his own by repeatedly taking money from the Patriots for something he says he knew was wrong at the time.

The lack of anything new didn’t stop Specter from continuing his overblown rhetoric on the subject, again invoking the notion of revisiting the NFL’s antitrust exemption, a cage Specter has rattled before. He wants an independent investigation, a congressional inquiry and, perhaps, a public flogging. He reserved judgment on what action to take next depending on the reaction of the fans. What’s the proper senatorial reaction to a yawn?

The strong guess is that if Goodell had to do this all over again, he would have conducted a more thorough inquiry the first time around and, for good measure, hung on to the evidence, if only to appease the conspiracy nuts. The fact that he didn’t only gave blowhards like Specter and a handful of New York Jets fans ammunition they didn’t need or deserve.

But that issue aside, lost in all the bluster is perspective. Taping a coach’s signals may be against the NFL operating manual, but on the scale of infractions, it trends far more toward driving 85 in a 65 MPH zone than it does armed robbery. In political terms that Specter can understand, it’s more akin to letting your feet wander in an airport bathroom stall than it is to lying to Congress about why you fired certain U.S. attorneys.

Even more to the point: what exactly is the purpose of Specter’s ongoing interest? The salient facts are known. The Patriots were punished, head coach Bill Belichick was fined. If some like Specter aren’t satisfied with the level of the punishment, personally I wasn’t happy with the way Specter didn’t make former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testify under oath to explain illegal wiretapping, but you don’t hear me continuing to bitch about it.

The saber rattling against the NFL by Specter is really nothing new and really has a deeper purpose. For context, remember the whole Philadelphia Eagles/Terrell Ownes mess? Specter stuck his nose into that as well, calling the Eagles vindictive after it sent Owens home for the rest of the season for basically placing the team under the bus and driving it over them himself. At that time, Specter too threatened to hold hearings on the NFL’s antitrust exemption. Over Owens? That should have been the tipoff.

On the surface, the Ownes situation and now Spygate make Specter seem like an overly obnoxious fan with a bit of a God complex. But if you look just below the surface, the real issue for Specter in Spygate and, for that matter, the Owens case, revolves around the NFL’s antitrust exemption and how it is negatively impacting one of his biggest campaign contributors, Pennsylvania-based Comcast.

Comcast, like a lot of cable operators wasn’t too happy when the NFL decided to re-up with DirecTV a few years ago instead of allowing cable systems to bid on the package. But things got far more interesting when the NFL Network rolled around. The reason the most of the country doesn’t get the NFL Network, at least on basic digital cable, has to do with some arguably poor marketing decisions by the NFL. When the NFL put up a package of eight late-season games for auction and then awarded the package to its own NFL Network, Comcast was fit to be tied, I tell ya because its Versus network was a bidder as well. In retaliation, Comcast moved the NFL Network from the basic digital tier to a sports tier available to subscribers for an additional fee. This, in turn, infuriated the NFL, and the parties are in a cold war over it, with the NFL filing a complaint against Comcast before the Federal Communications Commission. Meanwhile, the NFL Network is frozen out on most cable systems.

It’s always dangerous ground when taking sides in a fight between multi-billion dollar entities. Let’s just say that neither side is as innocent as it claims and neither is on the side of the fans, only the money. But these are big boys and they can settle their own disputes and don’t need Specter, doing Comcast’s bidding, getting in the middle of the food fight.

What Specter and his benefactor Comcast really want is the removal of the antitrust exemption. This would then make it illegal for the NFL to pool its broadcasting rights and bargain with the various networks, thus allowing operators like Comcast a real opportunity to bid for local broadcast rights in several markets. The NFL, for obvious reasons, likes things just the way they are. Indeed, the antitrust exemption is at the heart of the league-wide revenue sharing scheme that has benefited both the individual owners and the league for years.

Specter has been mostly an able legislator throughout his career, but his fight with the NFL isn’t even principally based. To this point, Goodell has been mostly polite to Specter, taking the high road by not mentioning the Specter/Comcast relationship. But just like the Owens/Eagles mess, Goodell knows that Spygate will fade. What won’t, though, is the underlying issues between the NFL and cable systems like Comcast and Time Warner.

Goodell knows that the real secret to getting Specter off his back is to solve his problems with Comcast. But NFL commissioners are also rumored to have a bit of a God complex as well, thus further minimizing the chance that these problems will get resolved anytime soon. In the interim, fans better get used to every so often hearing again about Spygate, Son of Spygate, and whatever other –Gate Specter can invent. With the kind of money that’s really at stake, neither side is obviously interested in trying to win this battle with moderation.

High Stakes Stare Down

The camera may never blink, but the same doesn’t go for the NFL. In a showdown between the NFL, its fans, Congress and the cable industry, it was the great and powerful NFL that melted faster than a stick of butter in a microwave oven. And because it did, the New England Patriots vs. New York Giants game this Saturday night will be blasted on seemingly every network except SoapNet.

The backdrop behind this interesting little behind-the-scenes stare down stems first from the NFL’s decision to create its own cable network, dubbed, cleverly, “The NFL Network.” In creating its own niche channel, the NFL was determined not to make what it perceived to be the mistakes of the NBA’s own network, NBA TV. What the NFL sees in regard to NBA TV is that in most markets it is relegated to a sports tier in which customers pay extra for a handful of sports-related programming or, in the case of Time Warner for example, to the digital tier, meaning customers at least have to subscribe to digital cable.

But a major difference between the two networks is in approach. NBA TV was created in partnership with AOL Time Warner back in 2002 as part of a larger deal when the NBA renewed its various network agreements. Although NBA TV does broadcast the a few games each week, it was never meant to take the place of the NBA’s pay-per-view package that is available on most cable and both satellite systems nor was it ever meant to supplant the games on TNT, ESPN or ABC or even local TV for that matter.

The NFL’s ambitions for its own network seem far greater. On the surface, it, too, seems to exist to supplement network coverage. But that is more a product of the fact that its agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN still have another five years to go. The longer term view seems to be one of opening up an additional revenue stream as a hedge, perhaps, against a reduction in the fees that the over-the-air networks might be willing to pay in the future. When it comes to technology, five years is a lifetime and with the seemingly inevitable convergence of the internet and television, among other things, the landscape for sports and any other television broadcasting for that matter is likely to be radically different when those existing contracts expire.

Thus, if the NFL can grab an extra dollar or so a month from every cable subscriber, which is its current ambition, that’s a tidy little stash even when the costs of running its own network are deducted. To this point, though, the NFL has mostly failed in its broadcasting quest. Time Warner only wants to give it the same treatment it gives NBA TV. Comcast, which does have a deal with the NFL Network, has actually moved it to a sports tier and is now in litigation over that decision, though it’s been beating the NFL at every turn in court.

The NFL has been counting almost solely on its brand awareness as the selling point for its channel because from a programming standpoint it rivals the NASA channel for pure tediousness, even after giving due respect to the relative handful of people in this country who absolutely must have a NFL fix on a daily basis.

Here, for example, is the programming for December 28, 2007: 6 a.m.: NFL Total Access, the NFL’s version of the Golf Channel’s Golf Central, which in turn is the Golf Channel’s version of ESPN’s SportsCenter. If you missed it at 6 a.m., don’t worry, it replays at 7 and 8 a.m. as well. At 9 a.m. is a documentary on the 1972 Dolphins. At 10 a.m. is a truncated replay of the Patriots/Cowboys game from October, followed by a truncated version of the Patriots/Colts game from November. At 1 p.m. is something called “Classic Games”, which is full replay of the Patriots/Eagles game from November. At 4 p.m. is “Point After” which takes the viewers on a scintillating review of the daily press conferences held by NFL coaches. About the only thing worse than attending a Bill Belichick press conference has to be watching a replay of it.

Then at 6 p.m. you get some sort of college football bowl game preview show, followed by “Put Up Your Dukes”, which is described as a look at the day’s hot topics and headlines in the NFL. This shouldn’t be confused with “NFL Total Access,” which follows, even though it too provides a look at the day’s hot topics and headlines. You then have the Texas Bowl, a top flight match-up between TCU and Houston, followed by repeats of NFL Total Access and Classic Games. Unquestionably that’s 24 hours of restaurant-quality programming.

The only real change in the programming on a day-to-day basis is late in the football season when the NFL Network shows games on Thursday and Saturday evenings. In reality, it’s the access to these games that supposedly is the selling point. But even then the lineup is hardly compelling, unless the outcome of your fantasy football league depends on what happened in the Broncos/Texans or the Bengals/49ers game.

Well, that is it wasn’t considered too compelling until what appeared to be a late-season throw away game between the Patriots and the Giants found its way on the NFL Network this year. When it first appeared on the schedule no one figured that this game would have potentially historic implications. But it does now and this would seem to have been the NFL’s best bargaining chip in its ongoing battle with the cable systems. And it would have been had the NFL not blinked in the stare down.

When it looked like the Patriots might actually go undefeated and the game against the Giants would be the final regular season obstacle, the NFL was indeed licking its chops. In mid-December, NFL Network spokesman Seth Palansky told the USA Today that there was “zero chance” that the network would allow the game to be broadcast on any other channel. In fact, he said there was as much chance of that changing as there was “raindrops going back into the clouds.” (Note: by contract, when a game is broadcast exclusively on cable, such as on ESPN or the NFL Network, the game also must be offered to the local stations, for a fee, in each participating team’s market.)

Well, apparently Palansky doesn’t actually speak for the NFL or else there are a whole lot of raindrops heading back into the clouds. The NFL tried to leverage the game in its negotiations with Time Warner by offering to give them the game for “free” on a basic cable tier in exchange for agreeing to let a neutral arbitrator resolve their long-standing dispute. Time Warner immediately rejected for the same reason anyone running his or her own business would similarly reject letting an arbitrator make its business decisions.

Rather than sit and wait for the masses to descend on the local Time Warner offices or at least for some misguided fan to start the inevitable online petition, the NFL instead folded its tent and decided instead to give away the game anyway to CBS and NBC. No word on whether the NFL is making Palansky himself put each and every raindrop back into each and every cloud.

In announcing this development, you had to like the pluck of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who insisted that the league was doing this because it was in the best interests of its fans. If that were true, then wouldn’t it follow that pulling games from the over-the-air broadcast partners in the first place and putting them exclusively on the NFL Network wasn’t in the best interests of the fans? Probably, though Goodell would never admit as much. In fact, as if to throw a bone to Palansky and his foolish bravado, Goodell said that the league’s commitment to the NFL Network was stronger than ever.

That may be true, but if it is, then Goodell has a funny way of showing that, too. By voluntarily giving up the one trump card he lucked into in the form of the Patriots/Giants game that might have actually pushed Time Warner and Comcast into some sort of customer backlash, Goodell essentially admitted that he’s in a battle he can’t win.

If the NFL Network, or its wannabe little brother, the Big Ten Network, ever want to get a deal with the major cable companies on the favorable terms they crave, simply put they have to withhold the product from the fans and let nature take its course. And by withholding product, that doesn’t mean withholding some meaningless Bengals/49ers game, in the case of the NFL, or Ohio State vs. Akron in the case of the Big Ten Network. For the strategy to work they have to be willing to pull the pin out of the grenade by withholding a potentially historic game like the Patriots/Giants or, say, the Super Bowl. For the Big Ten, they have to have the guts to withhold Ohio State vs. Michigan. Anything less and people just shrug.

But this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, if ever. Goodell can play his “best interests of the fans” card all he wants. The truth is that Goodell made the decision because it was in the best interests of the league. The last thing it needs is more outside oversight and the NFL already was getting more than just a few inquiries from Congress about its broadcast plans, and that was well before the Patriots/Giants game took on such meaning.

Just over a year ago, when the NFL first started broadcasting a handful of games on its own network, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicated that his committee was “intrigued” by the league’s plans, particularly whether they violated the Sports Broadcasting Act. By intrigued, he meant concerned.

The rumblings got a bit louder after Palansky’s statement earlier this month, mainly because while local stations in Boston and New York were going to get the Patriots/Giants game, stations outside that immediate market where many fans of both teams live could not. Those additional rumblings proved to be too much for Goodell and the NFL. For as he and his partners surely understand, the only thing that could kill their broadcasting dreams more definitively than the lack of a deal with either Time Warner or Comcast is Congress in general and a re-working of the anti-trust laws in particular.