Posted by John Vrooman on Tuesday, March 24, 2015 in National Football League.

Interview with CNBC. 

What reason would the NFL have for cutting out this policy after a season in which there were no blackouts?

The long sought blackout policy change is largely a cosmetic attempt to deflect mounting anti-blackout political pressure from the US Congress and to reflect negative blow-back from the FCC ruling limiting blackouts last Fall.

This no-lose public relations move attempts to create a singular positive vibe after a grueling season where the most powerful sports league in the world managed on one occasion or another to offend every segment of the socio-political spectrum. 

How could the potential for a blackout affect a team that would be moving in the coming years?

Rumors of relocation are classic recipes for local fans to boycott their home team, which leads to local TV blackouts and then falsely self-validates a failure of local support and rationalizes the preconditions for relocation that had originally began the pretzel logic of franchise relocation to begin with.

What could the suspension of blackouts—and the announcement of a digital-first game broadcast this season—mean for the NFL TV landscape moving forward?

Revenues from free-to-air networks CBS, NBC and FOX comprise about half of NFL total annual TV rights of about $6 billion which is in turn about 60 percent of total NFL revenues. The FCC ruling last Fall would allow satellite and cable providers to take up the blackout slack created by the NFL 85 percent blackout rule which would still apply to broadcasters. 

Broadcasters argued that the FCC rule change last fall would drive broadcast games to pay-TV providers like cable and satellite. So dropping the blackout rule is an attempt to reconcile potential problems with broadcasters vis-à-vis cable operators like ESPN.

In the grand scheme of things the suspension of the archaic blackout rule is much ado about nothing in a new digital world where the importance of TV revenue has flipped a 180 since the origins of the now obsolete blackout rule in a gate driven infant NFL.