NFL, All The Time

It's not that I hate football. But I just wish that when the season was over, it was over. It's the bane of sports talk radio, than in the middle of April, the majority of conversation isn't about basketball playoffs or hockey or baseball... it's about who the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are going to draft.

The league, constantly wrangling with politicians and the networks over broadcast rights, never takes a break either:

NFL Network on April 10 said it would file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, accusing Comcast of discriminatory and anti-competitive treatment.

In a statement, NFL Network said it has served Comcast with the required 10-day notice of its intent to file the FCC complaint in which it will argue that the nation’s largest cable operator’s decision to place the network on a premium sports tier for its more than 24 million subscribers while keeping other sports channels that it owns on expanded basic tiers amounts to a violation of the 1992 Cable Act.

“Comcast has taken NFL Network away from millions of fans and placed it on a costly sports tier,” Steve Bornstein, NFL Network’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “We don’t believe that Comcast should charge consumers extra for our network while making sports channels it owns available on a less costly basis. After months of trying to get Comcast to negotiate fair treatment, we have been forced to turn to the FCC.”

Comcast, buoyed by a May 2007 ruling, which is now being reexamined, migrated NFL Network from its most widely distributed digital package to a sports tier, a move that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says cost the service some 8 million subscribers with the operator alone.

BTW, did everyone see the congress wants to investigate the BCS again? As I say, better that than trying to develop some cockamamie fix to the housing crisis.