NFL isn’t cable ready, and viewers are getting tuned out
It is late November 2007 and the NFC is hours away from its most important game of its season.
Do you know where your Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys are?
Chances are, they won’t be on your home television screen. When the 10-1 Packers play the 10-1 Cowboys at Texas Stadium on Thursday evening, CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN will be on the inactive list. The game will be carried live nationally only on the NFL Network, which is available in about 35 million households in the U.S. -- most of them DirecTV and Dish Network subscribers.
Because of a bitter stalemate between the NFL and Big Cable over money, the 4-year-old NFL Network remains primarily a satellite-only experience. Such major cable operators as Cablevision, Charter, Comcast and Time Warner have refused the NFL’s demand to be paid about 70 cents per subscriber for the NFL Network, which the cable companies consider exorbitant.
That wasn’t a big deal until the league decided in 2006 to hand the NFL Network eight prime-time games each season.
And even that wasn’t a major issue when the fare included such nonessential matchups as last Thursday’s Indianapolis-Atlanta game, which kicked off the NFL Network’s broadcast schedule.
Green Bay-Dallas is a different matter.
So is the last game on the NFL Network’s schedule: New England at the New York Giants on Saturday, Dec. 29. The Patriots are 11-0 and could be on the brink of completing the league’s first 16-0 regular season when they play the Giants.
Green Bay-Dallas pairs the best teams in the NFC, traditional rivals that played one of the most memorable games in league history 40 years ago -- the legendary “Ice Bowl” at Lambeau Field, which decided the 1967 NFL championship.
On Dec. 31, 1967, the Packers and the Cowboys suffered brutal weather conditions that make complaints about the “unplayable” field Monday night in Pittsburgh sound trivial. Game-time temperature was minus-13, with a wind-chill factor of minus-48.
On a frozen playing surface better suited for hockey, the Packers trailed the Cowboys by three points with 16 seconds left and the ball on the Dallas one-yard line.
In one of pro football’s most famous calls, Packers Coach Vince Lombardi bypassed the tying field goal in favor of an all-or-nothing sneak by quarterback Bart Starr. Behind the block of Jerry Kramer, Starr shivered across the goal line and Green Bay won, 21-17.
The frostbitten images of that game are so indelible 40 years later that the “Ice Bowl” has become a veritable marketing device for the league. For example: The NFL Network will air “The NFL’s Greatest Games: The Ice Bowl” on Thursday morning (8 a.m. PST) as a lead-in to that evening’s game.
The “Ice Bowl” has also come to symbolize an era when football could be reduced to three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-tundra simplicity.
When players gutted out the absolute worst that Mother Nature could throw at them.
When coaches put their seasons, their careers and their reputations on the line instead of taking the safest way out.
When watching a big game between the Packers and the Cowboys was as easy as turning on the family Zenith and jiggling the rabbit ears.
Now, unless you live in the Green Bay-Milwaukee or Dallas areas, you won’t be able to watch the game live unless you have access to a satellite signal. And fans bundled up like polar explorers at the “Ice Bowl” thought they endured hardship.
Oh, but this is progress: The league will offer select video highlights, including live look-ins, on its website, NFL.com, and on mobile phones equipped with the Sprint Power Vision pack.
What would fans in 1967 have thought of such technological marvels?
Fan No. 1: “Look! We can see very tiny pictures of the Green Bay quarterback on a cordless telephone! And we can see them every time the Packers enter something called the ‘red zone!’ ”
Fan No. 2: “No thanks. I think I’ll stick with this big grainy black-and-white picture.”
Forty years on, millions of fans would consider that option a big trade up. Instead, they are caught in the middle of a corporate struggle, with the NFL and Big Cable pawing the turf they want to win like hulking linemen hunkering down in the trenches. Fans are hoping for an opening, just a little daylight.
Instead, they are getting more of the same old, same old -- the immovable object refusing to yield to the irresistible force.
Where is Jerry Kramer when you really need him?
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