The Bengals are a quality team. The Bengals find themselves in the thick of a playoff race. The Bengals haven’t lost at home all season.
And the fans don’t care. Well, not enough of them care.
Roughly 3,500 tickets remain for Sunday’s game against the Vikings. And the Bengals have obtained an extension though 4:00 p.m. ET Friday -- three hours longer than the usual extension -- to sell the tickets.
The development comes a day after the FCC formally proposed getting rid of the blackout rule entirely. Which would prevent teams from creating urgency to buy tickets by extending artificial deadlines to lift blackouts in the hopes that fans faced with the prospect of not getting to see the game on TV will buy tickets to see the game in person.
“We have tickets available on all levels of the stadium,” Bengals ticket sales manager Andrew Brown said in a team-issued release. “We are working hard to close that gap, and if our fan response stays as strong as it has been so far this week, we can have a full house for the Vikings.”
Of course, there’s a good chance the game will be televised even if not enough fans buy up the remaining tickets. Typically, an extension isn’t granted by the league absent a commitment that, if the tickets aren’t bought at full price by local citizens, the team and/or its sponsors will buy them at 34 cents on the dollar.
So, basically, the sense of urgency teams are creating often is a false one.
Which sort of supports getting rid of the blackout rule.
