billpalmer.net

It's about time the NFL did something intelligent with its own NFL Network. Unable to get most cable television carriers to offer the station to viewers, the league decided to start airing one or two games a week on its own network in the hopes that public outcry would force the cable companies to carry the station (not that it would do any good) or that millions of fans would ditch cable in favor of a satellite dish (which is a bigger deal than the NFL seems to realize). The league must have looked at how important fans consider the existing Sunday night and Monday night games (particularly Monday), and figured that if they put a game on Thursday and Saturday nights, the same thing would happen.

But what the league missed is that by virtue of so many games being simultaneously scheduled on Sunday afternoons each week, every fan is going to miss the majority of each week's games no matter what channel they're watching. Taking one of those Sunday afternoon games that most people weren't going to see anyway, moving it to Thursday night, and putting it on a station that almost no one gets, didn't change anything. Monday Night Football is important to fans because it's Monday Night Football. It's been important for decades, and you're not a real fan if you're not watching the Monday game, no matter who might be playing - even if it's two last-place teams with nothing to play for. But Thursday night doesn't have that tradition, and so putting a game on that night, and putting it on a channel that most folks couldn't tune in to, simply made the NFL Network the enemy at best and irrelevant at worst. After all, the only thing worse than having your fans mad at you is having your fans not caring one way or the other.

So here we are heading into one of the most culturally important regular season games in years, the one in which the Patriots try to match the '72 Dolphins by going undefeated, the one that everyone wants to see one way or the other. Even the Giants know how historically important this game is, vowing to play all of their starters despite the fact that the outcome of the game won't have any effect on their playoff status. And as luck would have it, that just happened to be the game that was scheduled to air this Saturday night on the station that almost no one can watch. No one planned it this way, it just happened to be the game that the league chose for its own network back before the season started.

And yesterday the NFL announces that instead of just tucking away one of its most important games on its own irrelevant network, they'll also be airing the game on not one but two major networks, NBC and CBS. Some are saying that the move was made because some members of Congress were hinting at revisiting the league's antitrust exemption, but for league's sake I hope they simply realized that this is an all-time great marketing opportunity.

One of the most tried and true axioms of launching something new, whether it's a new podcast or a new television station, is that you can't stand pat and hope that they magically come to you. Instead you've got to go where they are, win them over on their own turf, and then find a way to make sure they follow you home afterwards. And in this case that's exactly what the NFL is doing. Saturday night's game will be one big three-hour long informercial for the NFL Network, complete with their announcers, their programming notes, and any other bits of self-promotion they can cram into the game - and it'll all be airing on half of the nation's four non-cable network TV stations. For the first time ever, the irrelevant NFL Network will be placed on a very public pedestal, dressed up in the best light possible, and for perhaps the first time the public will finally get a taste of what they're missing out on.

As someone who's a much bigger fan of football fan than all other pro sports combined, I've always liked the NFL Network. Think of it as ESPN without having to sift through all the hours of other sports you don't care about. When I lived in one of the few places where I was able to get the NFL Network as part of a standard cable package, I left it on in the background all day while working. But when I moved to another location where it wasn't available on cable, I didn't harass the cable company, I didn't call my congressman, and I didn't switch to satellite. I just gave up on it and settled for ESPN News instead. But now with the NFL Network finally getting three hours of relevance this week by virtue of being simulcast on two other networks that people actually can and do watch, just maybe the NFL will be able to finally make its network relevant enough that someday soon I'll be able to watch it without taking drastic measures that just aren't worth it for most folks, even big NFL fans like me.