Who Pays the Bills Takes Priority Over Who Plays the Game

In the NFL’s repeated attempts to speed up games, one of the things it has tried to do is get the networks to take its commercial breaks judiciously.

It’s been a losing battle.

After all, the networks pay the bills--about $17 million per team per season.

While the league has stabilized the average game time at about 3 hours, 9 minutes, for the past three years, it hasn’t been able to reduce television’s intrusion into the game.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been any great protest.

“We get very few letters about it,” said Val Pinchbeck, the NFL’s director of broadcasting. “The biggest complaints are from local affiliates whose time is being cut into by long games.”

That’s probably because the viewer is conditioned to commercials--he can find things to do during the breaks. It’s another story for the viewer who pays $25 or more for a ticket, then sits through a downpour or frigid weather watching players standing around on the field.

The NFL is trying.

After the 1984 season, for example, the league and the networks agreed informally:

--That the game wouldn’t be interrupted when a team got a turnover in another’s territory so that the team getting the turnover would keep its momentum.

--That the networks would minimize the practice of catching up on commercials by taking one after a kickoff. That is, there would be no more of “touchdown, commercial, kickoff, commercial.”

The first has been observed most of the time; the second has not.

Since 1984, there have been other modifications--cutting from 22 to 16 the number of commercial breaks but increasing the time. But none has curtailed the networks from running rampant, particularly in deliberately making fans watching late games view less game and more commercial.

That is, even though there are supposed to be four breaks per quarter, on late games, the networks often go through the first quarter with no breaks, then, as the early games end, have continual commercial breaks through the end of the half.

“We’ve had dialogue with them,” Pinchbeck said. “They’re supposed to have four commercial breaks in each quarter. But if you have a long-running early game--one that goes overtime, for example--sometimes it turns out 0-8--no commercials in the first quarter, eight in the second. Then you wipe out the whole first half.”

An example.

A New England-New Orleans game on CBS ended about 1:20 p.m. PST. When the network cut into the second games, all were close to the end of the first quarters and, in the Phoenix-Dallas game, at least, they were doing the score, commercial, kickoff, commercial routine.

Moreover, because of commercials, there can be breaks as long as seven or eight minutes, with perhaps two or three plays squeezed in.

The NFL is expecting to get much more money than it gets now when it negotiates a new TV contract after this season--after all, baseball and basketball already have received massive increases.

Pinchbeck said that doesn’t necessarily mean more commercials.

“We don’t like it, the network doesn’t like it, and the advertiser doesn’t like it when you’re stopping games all the time,” he said. “But if the pace of the game is such, you periodically have to do it.”

And he added:

“The reason you get to see 85 games on free TV in some markets is because of the packages we can sell. The only reason we sell is that the networks can sell it to advertisers.”