Ticket sales in the NFL appear to be picking up.
For the second straight week, every NFL team has sold enough tickets to lift the local television blackout, and therefore there will be no blackouts in the NFL this week.
Among the teams doing well at the box office are the Raiders, who have now sold out their first five games of the season for the first time since 2006.
One of this week’s sellouts, Rams-Cardinals in Arizona, is a rather dreadful affair that benefited at the gate by the Cardinals’ decision to force people to buy tickets to this game if they wanted tickets to last week’s Steelers game. That meant a lot of Pittsburgh fans who purchased those tickets were stuck trying to re-sell tickets to the Rams-Cardinals game.
The Chargers, who host the Packers on Sunday, also forced any fan who wanted a ticket to the Packers game to get it as part of a multiple-game package. The Chargers are expecting so many Packers fans that they’re pumping in crowd noise at practice, something you don’t often see teams do before a home game.
And in a further sign that ticket sales are going well, the Bengals announced today that next week’s game against the Steelers has sold out -- the Bengals’ first sellout of the season.