Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 - Overview

Overview

The Sports Broadcasting Act was passed in response to a court decision which ruled that the NFL's method of negotiating television broadcasting rights violated antitrust laws. The court ruled that the "pooling" of rights by all the teams to conclude an exclusive contract between the league and CBS was illegal.

The Act overrules that decision, and permits certain joint broadcasting agreements among the major professional sports. It recognizes the fact that the various franchises in a sports league, while competitors in the sporting sense, are not as much business competitors as they are interdepedent partners, whose success as enterprises is intertwined, as a certain level of competitive balance between them must exist for any of them to remain viable enterprises. Therefore, it permits the sale of a television "package" to a network or networks in which the league members share equally, a procedure which is common today. Of the four major North American professional team sports, the Act is most pertinent to the NFL, as all of its regular-season and playoff games are covered by the rights assigned by its various packages with the networks, including its own.

The law has been interpreted to include the so-called "blackout rules" which protect a home team from competing games broadcast into its home territory on a day when it is playing a game at home, and from having to broadcast games within its home market area that have not sold out. It also, in effect, protects high school football and college football game attendance by blacking out pro football games locally on Friday evenings and Saturdays during those sports' regular seasons; these measures effectively outlawed the broadcasting (and, in practice, the playing) of NFL games on those days, since virtually all of the country is within 75 miles of at least one high school game on every Friday night in September and October.

This portion of the act has since been partially circumvented; the NFL extended its season in 1978 to allow several weeks of Friday night or Saturday games if the league so wished. Late-season Saturday games have been common since then, but Friday night games are still extremely rare; the league has played only eight Friday games since 1978, all but one in December (a Chiefs-Dolphins game set for Miami on Sunday, October 23, 2005, was moved up two days due to Hurricane Wilma).

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s broadcast packages are not subject to the antitrust exemption and it suffered for it, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA's restrictive television policies were a violation of antitrust law in the 1980s when the University of Georgia and the University of Oklahoma sued the NCAA over television restrictions (limit of six television appearances over two years) established in 1952. However, after their court victory, neither Georgia nor Oklahoma made serious efforts to market their own television packages, but instead followed the lead of their conferences, the Southeastern Conference and the Big 8 Conference respectively.

The College Football Association, an alliance of 64 schools from some of the major conferences and selected independents, sold their own television package in 1984, first to ABC, and later to CBS. The Big Ten and Pac-8 conferences, not CFA affiliates, sold their own separate package, to ABC.

By 1990, the landscape changed. ABC had both the CFA, Big Ten, and Pac-10 packages, and NBC the Notre Dame home package. It was once again relegated to limited appearances.

The CFA collapsed, and in 1995, the Southeastern Conference signed a national deal with CBS. They are the only major conference guaranteed a national "game of the week" because ESPN's games may come from any of the conferences they offer.