The NFL is reconsidering some of its TV rules in Los Angeles as part of the Rams’ move back to the market, according to several sources.
In particular, the league wants to ease its doubleheader rule, which would prohibit a second game from airing against a Rams home game.
In every other market, NFL TV rules dictate that when an NFL team has a home game, a rival network is not allowed to carry a competing game in the same time slot.
That meant that the L.A. market would be limited to carrying only a Rams home game, forcing potentially more interesting doubleheader games to be blacked out in L.A., the country’s second-largest TV market. Sources said that the league has told its TV partners that they might be able to televise against Rams home games a limited number of times. It’s not clear how often the league would relax that rule.
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L.A. fans are getting their Rams back, but L.A. TV viewers won’t lose all their NFL doubleheaders.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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The move would be cheered by NFL fans in Los Angeles. For the past two decades, NFL Sundays in Los Angeles have been just about perfect for football fans — even with no hometown team to support. That’s because fans were able to see the best games on television each week without having to worry about blackouts. Since the Rams and Raiders left the market in the mid-1990s, CBS and Fox combined carried at least three Sunday afternoon games each week.
League executives, not the networks, would decide when to relax the doubleheader rules in L.A. League officials would have to strike a balance between getting the best games of the year into such an important TV market while not hindering the Rams’ ability to sell tickets and build their fan base.
Sources said that network executives were not necessarily aggressive in lobbying for the league’s return to Los Angeles. The presence of an L.A.-based team is not expected to produce bigger ratings for any of the league’s prime-time packages, which already are at or near all-time highs.
Because the Rams are an NFC team, the Sunday afternoon NFC rights holder, Fox Sports, is expected to see the most impact. While viewership in Los Angeles should rise, it should fall in St. Louis, and it is expected to have minimal affect on Fox’s national TV ratings, which hit a record high during the just-completed regular season. Fox averaged its highest audience (20.7 million viewers) last season since first picking up an NFL package in 1994.
CBS, which is only expected to produce a handful of Rams games, also should see little impact on its NFL ratings next season.
“Over time, the move to L.A. is good for the league,” said Sports Media Advisors Founder and CEO Doug Perlman. “I’m not so sure it means that much to the TV networks.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
