Two years ago, the New England Patriots prepared to attempt to cap a perfect regular season against the New York Giants. The game was scheduled to be telecast only by NFL Network.
A mountain of pressure was placed on the NFL, and the league eventually decided to permit the key Saturday night contest to be simulcast on NBC and CBS.
This year, another critical late-season game will be played on a Saturday night in December, and it will be available only on NFL Network. Though it doesn’t come in Week 17, the Saints would be working on stretching their record to 14-0 against the self-styled America’s Team, assuming that New Orleans beats the Redskins and the Falcons in the next two weeks.
It remains to be seen whether the league faces renewed pressure to export the game to other networks, especially since the circumstances are somewhat different. Again, it’s not the last piece of a perfect puzzle. Likewise, NFLN is now distributed on a much broader basis, thanks to a deal with Comcast that puts the league-owned channel into millions of additional homes.
Still, the fact that NFL Network remains absent from carriers like Time Warner means that plenty of Cowboys fans, Saints fans, and general football fans who want to see the game won’t be able to do so.
Last time around, some Congressional saber-rattling helped get the game moved to networks available in virtually every American home with a television set in it. Given the extent to which the league has shouted “how high?” in response to a recent request by Congress to jump on the problem of brain injuries, it probably won’t take much needling to get the league to give the nation a Christmas present only five days before Santa Claus makes his rounds.