One way to deal with political pressure is to ignore it and hope it goes away. Another way is to meet it head-on.
The NFL, which for the most part has tiptoed around the multi-platform assault on the broadcast antitrust exemption embedded in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, has come out swinging — with the franchise that can best be propped up as the poster child for the status quo.
Via Rob Demovsky of ESPN (which is now partially owned by the Packers and the rest of the NFL), the Packers have issued a statement pushing back on potential changes to the SBA. And Wisconsin Representative Scott Fitzgerald, who is on the committee studying the SBA and who recently dismissed the team’s concerns about the antitrust exemption, has become the target of Green Bay’s ire.
“Packers fans everywhere should be deeply concerned that Rep. Fitzgerald admitted to giving ‘zero’ consideration to keeping the Packers in Green Bay as he explores upending the 65-year-old Sports Broadcasting Act,” the Packers said. “Fans should be offended that Fitzgerald then went further, saying our concerns were ‘laughable.’ What is laughable is that a congressman from Wisconsin is leading this charge. Why threaten the team his community overwhelmingly cherishes and its ability to compete on a level playing field?
“The tremendously successful model of pooling media rights and sharing revenue equally amongst teams has allowed the Packers to survive and thrive in the smallest media market in professional sports. This model is as foundational to the Packers’ existence as the very bricks in Lambeau Field. It is careless and unwise to rearrange the bricks of a foundation which has stood strong for over half a century.”
Demovsky’s article contains other talking points regarding the Packers’ struggle to compete with other NFL teams in the current climate. He points out that the Packers don’t have a deep-pocketed owner. (Of course, that’s because the Packers decided to embrace a non-stock stock structure decades ago, making it impossible for any one person to ever acquire ownership of the team.) Demovsky also mentions that the Packers can’t sell a piece of the team to private-equity funds. (Same reason.)
The concern is that, because the Packers are in the NFL’s smallest market, a requirement to sell TV rights individually would put the Packers at a disadvantage. But the Packers are a popular national brand. If the broadcast antitrust exemption were to disappear altogether (and it most likely won’t), every team would have to sell the rights to its home games.
Despite the size of the market, the Packers would be a very valuable property for a national TV deal. It’s Lambeau Field. The Frozen Tundra. It’s a bedrock franchise with a strong national following.
If the current socialized structure for NFL TV money suddenly flipped to a model that more closely mirrors true American capitalism, the Packers would land far closer to the Cowboys than the Jaguars when it comes to the annual cash value of Green Bay’s coast-to-coast TV viewership.
Would losing the broadcast antitrust exemption create chaos for the NFL? Yes, it would. But the Packers would likely do better than plenty of other teams under an every-franchise-for-itself model.
The broader question is whether the Packers devised their recent strategy to fight for the antitrust exemption on their own, or whether this is the latest effort by the NFL to fend off a Fox-driven political push in response to the NFL’s effort to get the broadcast networks to pay a lot more for settled TV deals through 2029. With the league’s “87-percent” talking point having significant flaws, which were exposed during last week’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, the NFL needed to come up with another P.R. plan.
The Packers first touched on the issue last week, in a mailbag column posted the day before the hearing. With Congress reportedly cobbling some sort of legislation together, the Packers have now made a more overt gesture.
We live in an age where the justification for anything someone wants is to claim that, if they don’t get it, they’ll face an existential threat. That’s essentially what the Packers (and the NFL) are now doing.
If the SBA goes away, the Packers won’t survive.
But Fitzgerald isn’t advocating for the antitrust exemption to be scrapped. In the interview to which the Packers are objecting, Fitzgerald simply uses the word “tweaked.”
For now, here’s the basic reality. Congress is taking a close look at the SBA, changes to it could be made, and the NFL (via the Packers) is trying its best to keep any changes to the SBA, “tweaking” or otherwise, from happening.
