Among sports-watching windows, the NFL’s expanded wild-card weekend is top-tier stuff: six games spread over three days, with all sorts of implications. This year, that includes a tantalizing Saturday night showdown, with the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs hosting former teammate Tyreek Hill and the Dolphins.
The game is a rematch of the teams’ grinder Week 9 meeting in November, when both entered with 6-2 records and the Chiefs prevailed, 21-14. It may also prove to be the coldest playoff game in Kansas City history, with temperatures in the single digits at kickoff and possibly plunging below zero later on.
An NFL winter classic featuring a team from South Florida.
Interested? I thought so.
It’ll cost ya six bucks.
So here comes your future. The Chiefs-Dolphins rematch marks the first time that an NFL playoff game has disappeared completely behind a paywall. The smart money says it certainly won’t be the last. And what the league’s execs and their broadcast partners really want to start learning this weekend is where your pain point lies.
In this case, NBC will require those wishing to watch to subscribe to its Peacock streaming service at $5.99 a month. There’s no other option for viewing, outside of the NFL+ mobile device. NBC’s local affiliates in Kansas City and Miami are allowed to broadcast the game, but otherwise, it ain’t happening without a sub.
That’s awful for fans, but it’s almost a full-circle money evolution for the league. Once upon a time and for decades, the NFL blacked out TV broadcasts in teams’ home market unless at least 85% of the stadium’s tickets were sold three days before kickoff — even for terrible franchises mired deep in losing seasons. It was as subtle as a mallet.
The subscription paywall is simply a more current version of that type of coercion. And let’s face it, we’re always paying — it just doesn’t always take the obvious form. If you watch a broadcast on “free” TV, there’s a reason it takes well more than three hours to complete the 60 minutes of actual game time. (You also paid the cable freight, by the way.)
What the league doesn’t really know with paywalls is where the line will get crossed and enough people say no for it to matter. That will likely be an evolving process. I once asked an NBA franchise owner who was dramatically raising season ticket prices about his strategy with the hometown fans, and he replied, “There’s a price ceiling there somewhere. They’ll tell us where it is.” This is something like that.
The NFL certainly carries risk here, but maybe not as much as NBC. The league itself is already facing social media blowback from football fans in general, who want to see an interesting Chiefs-Dolphins matchup without jumping through any more hoops than usual. That public unhappiness will intensify as diehard Chiefs fans in areas outside the KC local affiliate’s reach realize that they’re getting dumped, too – and that is a lot of fans spread across multiple states.
But the league covered its bet — and made this really more of a fact-finding mission — when it got NBC to cough up a reported $110 million for the exclusive broadcast rights to this one playoff game. Thus, it’s the network that would really need a healthy Peacock subscription uptick this week in order to pay off its larger strategy of exposing new viewers to the service’s other streaming programming.
Amazon’s Prime Video this season averaged 11.86 million viewers per Thursday Night Football game, which the company said marked a 24% increase over the previous year. That is roughly two-thirds of the average audience for games broadcast by FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC/ESPN, etc. and their digital platforms.
Prime Video’s numbers reflect healthy growth, but the streamer is an inexact comparison for Peacock. Amazon already has more than 200 million Prime members around the world, most of whom pay for the service in order to have stuff quick-shipped to their home or to consume other entertainment. It’s not really about football.
Can Peacock, with 30 million current subscribers, make a dent with one playoff offering? According to The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch, the NFL’s six wild-card broadcasts last year averaged 28.8 million viewers, but all of those games were easily accessed through consumers’ existing setups. This, for most NFL fans, will require them taking on yet another subscription — and in January, when many of us otherwise start cutting back on apps.
Or fans can just skip it, and get ready for a Sunday triple-header on the traditional nets.
You’ll be the judge — literally – based on your choice. Both the network and the NFL are guessing that once people get their complaints out of the way and see the Chiefs-Dolphins kickoff approaching, enough of them will still grab a quick Peacock subscription to justify the league taking such a high-profile game out of national broadcast circulation.
It’s a money-in, money-out proposition, and that’s all it is. From the c-suite level, it has nothing to do with fan friendliness or fan hostility. It is purely an exercise in measuring where the cash moves, and how.
Is it cynical? Oh, you bet. But if you expected anything else from a pro sports league and its financial partners in 2024, you’re walking through the wrong neighborhood.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
