The National Football League television blackout policies are the strictest among the four major professional sports leagues in North America.
The NFL maintained a blackout policy, from 1973 through 2014, that stated that a home game cannot be televised in the team's local market if 85% of the tickets are not sold out 72 hours before the starting time of the match. This made the NFL the only major professional sports league in the United States that requires teams to sell out tickets in order to broadcast a game on television locally. Nationally televised games in the other leagues often are blacked out on the national networks on which the game is airing in the local markets of the participating teams. Those games still can be seen on the local broadcast television station or regional sports network that normally holds their local/regional broadcast rights. The NFL's sellout requirement blackout (but not the pay-television blackout, governed by syndication exclusivity) policy has been suspended on a year-to-year basis since 2015.
The NFL also is the only league that imposes an anti-siphoning rule in all teams' local markets: the NFL sells syndication rights of each team's cable and streaming games to a local over-the-air station in each local market. The respective cable station must be blacked out when that team is playing the said game (alternate telecasts, such as Nickelodeon’s NFL broadcasts, are not required to be simulcast in the local markets), but streaming games are not subject to blackout if the local station is simulcasting.
Getting around restrictions
The earliest NFL television blackout policy blacked out all broadcasts on radio and television of any games in the home city of origin and on any television stations located within of the team's home city, regardless of whether they were sold out, during those time periods when the teams were playing at home. Teams were also allowed to restrict home-market stations from broadcasting games in other markets during the times they were playing away games broadcast live in their home market. Even if they gave their approval for a telecast or broadcast they might otherwise have been able to permit, the NFL commissioner was still required to approve it, and did not need to give an explanation.
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against the league over these provisions. The NFL argued that the antitrust exemption for professional baseball and recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court applied to it; Judge Allan Kuhn Grim of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania declined to reach that question, holding that since antitrust law clearly applied to radio and television it applied in the instant case as well, and granted an injunction barring all those practices save the restriction on outside-market game broadcasts during home games.
The Supreme Court later rejected the NFL's claim to the same antitrust exemption as baseball. Thus, in 1961, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, granting football and other professional team sports an exemption from antitrust law allowing them to negotiate television contracts as leagues and not individual teams.
Until 1973, league policy resulted in home-city blackouts even during sold-out regular-season games and championship games. For instance, the 1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants was unavailable to viewers in the New York City market despite the sellout at Yankee Stadium (many fans rented hotel rooms or visited friends in areas of Connecticut or Pennsylvania where signals of television stations carrying the game were available to watch the game on television, a practice that continued for Giants games through 1972). Similarly, all Super Bowl games prior to Super Bowl VII in January 1973 were not televised in the host city's market.
A 1970 game between the New York Giants and New York Jets at Shea Stadium was broadcast in New York by WCBS-TV when the Jets agreed to lift the blackout to allow Giants fans to view the game live. Later that season, when the San Francisco 49ers visited the Oakland Raiders, Raiders owner Al Davis enforced the blackout in the Bay Area to the considerable anger of CBS, the 49ers and fans of both teams.
The policy was in effect when, in 1972, the Washington Redskins made the playoffs for only the second time in 27 seasons. Because all home games were blacked out, politicians, including President Richard Nixon, a devout football fan, were not able to watch their favorite team's home games, as the primary carrier for such games, CBS affiliate WTOP-TV (now WUSA) was forced to black out the games and carry alternate programming. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle refused to lift the blackout for the NFC Championship Game, despite a plea from United States Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Kleindienst went on to suggest that the United States Congress re-evaluate the NFL's antitrust exemption. (Nixon watched the playoff games vs. the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys from the Florida White House on Key Biscayne and from Camp David, respectively, and Super Bowl VII from his friend Bebe Rebozo's Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida)
Rozelle agreed to lift the blackout for Super Bowl VII on an "experimental basis," if the game sold out ten or more days in advance. With the game a sellout, viewers in the Los Angeles area were able to see the NBC telecast of the game. Nonetheless, Congress intervened before the 1973 season anyway, passing Public Law 93-107, sponsored by Democratic U.S. Representative Torbert MacDonald of Massachusetts (signed by Nixon on September 14, 1973, two days before the start of the regular season), which eliminated the blackout of games in the home market so long as the game was sold out by 72 hours before game time. The league will sometimes change this deadline to 48 hours if there are only a few thousand tickets left to be sold. Much more rarely, the NFL will occasionally reduce the deadline to 24 hours in special cases, such as when there is a very low number of tickets (fewer than 1,000) remaining with 48 hours left before the game, or if holidays fall during the 72 and/or 48 hour deadlines.
Unsold tickets allocated to visiting teams, as well as all seats located in premium club sections and luxury suites have been excluded from the blackout rule. Unsold tickets allocated to visiting teams may be sold by the home team after the blackout deadline has passed. Modern NFL stadiums have reduced general seating in favor of club seating and luxury suites, as this makes it easier to sell out the stadium and avoid blackouts. Revenue from premium club seating and luxury suites does not have to be shared with other franchises. Alternatively, some NFL teams have arrangements with local television stations or businesses (often sponsors of the team and/or its local broadcasts) to purchase unsold tickets. Teams themselves are allowed to purchase remaining non-premium tickets at 34¢ on the dollar (the portion subject to revenue sharing) to prevent a blackout. Teams can also lift the blackout on their own; this has occasionally been done in cases of stormy weather on game days.
The NFL requires that closing off sections be done uniformly for every home game, including playoff games, in a given season. This prevents teams from trying to sell out the entire stadium only when they expect to be able to do so. For instance, the Jacksonville Jaguars closed off a number of sections at their home stadium, EverBank Field, to reduce the number of tickets they would need to sell. EverBank Field is one of the largest venues in the NFL, as it was built to also accommodate the annual Florida-Georgia game and Gator Bowl in college football, and was expanded for Super Bowl XXXIX, even though it draws from one of the smallest markets in the league.
The NFL authorized a new rule loosening the league's blackout restrictions during the 2012 offseason. Under the new rule, for the first time in NFL history, the ticket sales provision no longer requires a stadium to be sold out in order for a game to be televised; instead, teams are allowed to set a benchmark of anywhere from 85% to 100% of the stadium's non-premium seats. Any seats sold beyond that benchmark will be subject to heavier revenue sharing. While most teams participate in the new blackout rules, four teams: the Buffalo Bills, Cleveland Browns, Indianapolis Colts and San Diego Chargers, continued to follow the previous blackout rule, as under the 2012 rule modification, the teams would be required to pay a higher percentage of gate fees to the NFL's revenue fund.
End of FCC enforcement, temporary suspension Until September 2014, the NFL blackout rules were sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which enforced rules requiring cable and satellite providers to not distribute any sports telecast that had been blacked out by a broadcast television station within their market of service. On September 9, 2014, USA Today published an editorial from FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, which stated that he was submitting a proposal to "get rid of the FCC's blackout rules once and for all", to be voted on by the agency's members on September 30 of that year, declaring such policies to be "obsolete". On September 30, 2014, the Commission voted unanimously to repeal the FCC's blackout rules. However, the removal of these rules are, to an extent, purely symbolic. The NFL can still enforce its blackout policies on a contractual basis with television networks, stations, and service providers, a process made feasible by the large amount of leverage the league places on its media partners.
Ultimately, no games would be blacked out at all during the 2014 season. On March 23, 2015, the NFL's owners voted to suspend the blackout rules for the 2015 NFL season, meaning that all games would be televised in their home markets, regardless of ticket sales. The suspension continued into the 2016 season; commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the league needed to further investigate the impact of removing the blackout rules before such a change is made permanent. While the league never explicitly stated such, the blackout suspension continued into 2017.
Blackout radius
The NFL defines a team's market area as "local" if it is within a radius of the team's home stadium. Therefore, a blackout affects any market where the terrestrial broadcast signal of an affiliate station, under normal conditions, penetrates into the 75-mile radius. These affiliates are determined before the season, and do not change as the season progresses. Some remote primary media markets, such as Denver and Phoenix, may cover that entire radius, so that the blackout would not affect any other affiliates. However, in some instances, a very tiny portion of a distant city's market area can be within the 75-mile radius of a different city, therefore leading to blackouts well beyond the targeted area.