OUTSIDE those living off inheritances, it’s hard to find rich people who are financial fools. Nevertheless, the NFL increasingly seems to be banking on the business of such hard-to-find folks.
Consider what’s currently going on in the NFL as compared with what’s going on in your life.
With people of all incomes singing the economic blues, NFL teams are behaving as if things have never been better for everyone!
This offseason, a 31-year-old offensive guard was signed to a $40 million contract, $21 million of it guaranteed. Alan Faneca, Steelers to Jets. And a jury’s-still-out safety, Gibril Wilson, left the Giants for a $39 million deal, nearly $20 million of it guaranteed, from the Raiders. There’s such a signing, or two, every day.
At the same time, more and more NFL teams, eager for new forms of income, are moving toward personal seat license (PSL) sells, a once comically impossible concept that forces season ticket holders to buy the right to buy season tickets in addition to buying season tickets.
With the cost of living way up, the NFL continues to abuse its ticket-holders while simultaneously maintaining its anything-for-money march toward becoming a made-for-TV, nighttime league.
That means fewer good teams will play at 1 p.m., which was once, and for good reason, the most logical and reasonable time to start NFL games. More and more, 1 p.m. games will be moved, on short notice, to 4:15 and Sunday nights. Meanwhile, Monday night football will be sustained, and the NFL will continue to feed the NFL Network’s Thursday and Saturday night schedule.
Again: The better the teams, the later their games, the greater the inconvenience for ticket-holders.
So, with the Jets and Giants soon expected to demand PSL money, why would anyone, in their right mind, pay many thousands of dollars more for tickets when their team, if successful, will play more and more games that begin and end at inconvenient and even at once inconceivably senseless times?
Throughout the NFL, tickets to such games have become harder to dump, almost as difficult as those preseason-game tickets NFL teams force on season subscribers. Who, short of jobless and kid-less fools, wants to attend a Sunday night or Monday night or Thursday night game played outdoors in the winter? Now teams are going to demand that people pay a whole lot more thousands of dollars more per customer to get stuck with those tickets.
In other words, outside of corporations, the PSL purchaser will have to root harder than ever for his team to have a rotten year so it will play a lot of 1 p.m. games. Thus he can actually use most of the season’s tickets he couldn’t renew unless he also spent a fortune on PSLs.
Sounds good to me! But are there enough rich idiots to go around?
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Tiger Woods, we’re often reminded, has helped “grow the game.” But in TV’s no-one-else-worth-watching hands, that’s hard to tell. And now that Woods is down with knee surgery, the subliminal TV message to the same new golf fans that Woods has spawned becomes: No Woods, no reason to watch golf.
Lookalikes: Mike Diamond of NYC submits Devils’ coach Brent Sutter and Russian president Vladimir Putin. . . . SNY, three years in, is “still working” on providing closed captioning. The FCC allows new networks four years to provide transcriptions for the deaf and hearing impaired.
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Everything sports, these days, has at least a little larceny added. To that end, subscribers to MLB.com’s “Gameday Audio” receive 14 free issues of Sports Illustrated. Of course, there’s a catch. If the subscriber, after 14 issues, fails to cancel SI, he or she will be billed for it.
In consumer-affairs terms, this is called a “negative option” being billed for something you never ordered. Marketing departments rely on consumers/suckers to forget to cancel or to not know that they have to cancel before billing begins. It stinks.
Of course, though, it has the blessings of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, Commissioner.
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There are NFL execs who still cannot believe that Bryant Gumbel was hired to be the play-by-play voice of the start-up NFL Network to begin with.
Not only did Gumbel, who recently resigned, have no football play-by-play experience it showed we’re told that NFLN was paying him roughly $1 million a year to call eight games. That’s roughly $125,000 a game. That’s roughly crazy.
On the other hand, if you consider he had no experience, he wasn’t as bad as he was expensive.
Fifty years later, TV people still think sports fans tune to games to hear announcers. Announcers can enhance the telecast or they can drive viewers to distraction, but they can’t make anyone, outside of their immediate families, watch.