Sports Leagues vs. Cable Cos.

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A Tier-ful Solution

The idea of a sports tier, which Comcast is promoting, makes tons of sense. If I'm sitting out here in LA and want to watch my onetime home team, the Washington Redskins, I should have a way to do it. But I should not have the rest of my neighbors pay for that right.

Frankly, NFL executives know this better than most. Even as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell went on the offensive, telling reporters on a conference call on Nov. 20 that a freely obtainable NFL Network was "in the best interest of the fans at the end of the day," NFL owners were raking it in from their own version of a sports tier on DirecTV (DTV). It's called the NFL Sunday Ticket, an all-you-can eat menu of football games offered only by satellite operator DirecTV Group that pays the NFL around $700 million a year. For as much as $279 a year, more than 1.5 million folks already are getting football on their own version of a sports tier from DirecTV.

Clearly, the NFL already has accepted a sports tier of sorts, despite their protests to the contrary. O.K., maybe I am being a little harsh on the sports guys. They do have ever rising costs. And the NFL has former ESPN (DIS) Chairman Steve Bornstein, one of the smartest TV executives, calling plays as they sign those outrageous TV contracts. He has managed to very cleverly pit the networks against one another, making NFL ownership a license to print money.

I get the feeling that Comcast has its back up with the NFL in large part due to the damaged feelings left when Bornstein engineered the Sunday Ticket deal in 2004. Comcast wanted to bid on that as well, according to Goodell, but didn't submit a bid in time. Not all sports are played on fields with lines on them.

No Winners

While we're at it, Comcast is no saint in this sports battle. The cable giant plays fast and loose with its own sports properties. While consigning the NFL Network to its sport-lovers tier, it places its own sports channels, namely its all-sports channel Versus, in a prominent place on its basic service for anyone to get. Versus costs cable operators roughly 25¢ a month, a smaller amount but still one that a ton of nonsports lovers are subsidizing.

This is the time of year when sports starts to count: College rivalries litter the sports pages, pro football teams are making their final runs to the playoffs. In fact, the NFL Network has the exclusive rights to carry one of the year's biggies, the contest on Nov. 29 between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers. Both teams are 10-1, and Brett Favre is having the best year of his future Hall of Fame career.

It's a game that most of the country would love to watch, but can't. That's a shame. And it should be a conundrum for the NFL: Do the fans really win while the league is holding the game hostage to pursue an even larger share of an already incredible pile of money they get from the TV networks? As I see it, that's an easy call.

Grover is Los Angeles bureau manager for BusinessWeek.