TMQ Returns! Football just keeps getting bigger

Spoiler alert: billionaire owners still fleece the public

The NFL is infinitely expanding – just like the universe!

There are now 17 regular-season games, plus an extra week of playoffs. An 18^th game is in the offing, perhaps a postseason that runs past Valentines Day.

Nielsen says 93 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts 2023 were NFL games, with the Super Bowl once again the top-rated TV show in the United States.

While ratings are declining in almost all television, NFL numbers keep rising. Sunday Night Football on NBC had double the audience of the top scripted show, NCIS.  

Not that long ago the cult comedy Freaks & Geeks was cancelled by NBC because having only 7 million viewers put the show at the bottom for scripted television. Today it would be near the top, ahead of Law & Order. That’s how weak network primetime has become. The exception is the NFL.

Freaks & Geeks. Image courtesy DreamWorks.

The whole calendar is in jeopardy. Last year there was a Friday NFL game the day after Thanksgiving. This year there are two Friday games, including the second contest of the season, Packers “at” Eagles in São Paulo on Friday.

Both clubs aren’t leaving for Brazil till Wednesday morning. Green Bay flies farther and through one more time zone than Philadelphia. So the jet-lag factor may go to the Eagles. 

In 1961, in exchange for an antitrust exemption, the NFL promised Congress never to play on Friday, leaving the day to high schools. Now the NFL is sowing the ground for regular Friday games, perhaps as soon as 2025. Promises to Congress be damned!

Note: Congress be damned is the motto of many business lobbies. Which sounds classier in Latin: Congressus promissiones damnentur.

This season the NFL will air its copyrighted programming – staged in public at taxpayer-subsidized facilities, yet the private property of the league’s billionaire owner-royalty class – on Amazon (same owner as the Washington Post), Apple (world’s most valuable corporation by market cap), NBC terrestrial and NBC Peacock streaming (owned by Comcast), ESPN cable, ABC terrestrial and Hulu streaming (owned by Disney), Fox, Google (YouTube TV airs Sunday Ticket), Netflix, CBS (owned by Paramount) and Twitter.

Walmart’s founding family now owns the Denver Broncos. Can ExxonMobil and CVS joint ventures with the NFL be far behind?

With nearly all corporate America now having a vested interest in NFL profitability, there’s hardly any big-money player that has not been coopted into supporting taxpayer subsidies for football.