15-0 Patriots Gets Dual Free Network Coverage Saturday (Dec 27, 2007)

After weeks of insisting that the network won't cave in and make this weekend's historic game available for all broadcast viewers, the NFL network did just that.

Saturday night's historic game between New England and the New York Giants was going to be exclusively on the NFL Network, which is available in fewer than 40 percent of the nation's homes with TVs. Instead, this game will be on not one, but two broadcast networks, CBS and NBC, as well as the NFL network.

With a win, the New England Patriots will become the first NFL team to have an undefeated season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins, but since the NFL expanded the number of regular season games from 14 to 16, New England has to work harder than the 1972 Dolphins did to achieve the first undefeated regular season record since way back then.

In 1972, the Dolphins went 14-0 for the season, plus they won the two playoff games and the Uper-s Owl-b game, giving them a 17-0 record for the combined regular and postseason games; this is a feat that has gone unmatched since.

The Patriots could become the first NFL team to go 16-0 in the regular season. They will play two playoff games and, unless the San Diego Chargers are there to defeat them in the NFC finals, they could go to the Uper-s Owl-b game to achieve a 19-0 regular and postseason record.

CBS and NBC are simulcasting the game with the NFL network on Saturday. Why didn't the NFL let Fox and ESPN broadcast the game as well?

The NFL network has been hampered with low cable company coverage due to a lack of the quantity of original programming, with the heads of cable companies reasoning that with only 26 hours of original programming a year, it doesn't make financial sense to carry such a network, especially one that charges 70 cents a month for carriage, which has to be passed on to the subscriber. The cable companies that chose to carry the network declined to put NFL network on their basic cable systems and have put them on a sports package on their digital tier.

Companies such as Cox put NFL network on their digital tier. Other companies such as Comcast and Time Warner have declined to carry the network as part of basic packages.

Lawmakers in the Capitol have pressured the NFL to ensure more viewers could see the game.

Last week, two prominent members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Goodell threatening to reconsider the league's antitrust exemption. With such a threat looming for the NFL network, the NFL was forced to deal and allow this Patriot/Giant game to be shown on broadcast television.

This game, and a key Thursday night game between the then 10-1 Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day drew widespread complaints about the lack of availability.

Local TV affiliates in the Boston, Manchester, N.H., and New York areas were already set to simulcast the game under NFL policy, and will still be able to air the game. What it means is that viewers in those markets will have four channels to choose from if they get NFL Network, plus CBS, NBC, and their local station.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who had urged cable and NFL executives to settle the dispute, had a much more positive reaction to the league's announcement. "I couldn't be more thrilled that as the Patriots rush toward an historic undefeated season, football fans everywhere have won a victory of their own," Kerry said. "With today's announcement, the NFL showed their loyalty to the sports fans who made the NFL an empire in the first place. The best news of all is that now no die-hard Pats fans will be shut out from watching their team take aim at football history."

We go way back to the year of 1967, over 40 years ago, actually January of that year, when CBS had the old NFL before the merger with the AFL, which was carried by NBC. There was no Monday Night Football until the fall of 1970, no ESPN, and of course, no NFL network back then.

Lamar Hunt, the architect of the AFL and the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, the winner of the AFL championship game earlier that season, had an idea to have the champion of the AFL play the champion of the NFL, the Green Bay Packers, in a championship game to determine which is the best football team in America.

The first of these super matchups in a bowl, and you can figure out how the annual battle of the champions got their name, happened on January 15, 1967, in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. This game matched Hank Stram's Chiefs, with a record of 12-2-1, against Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, with a record of 13-2, in a game to determine the ultimate championship football team of the season from the two leagues combined. 61,946 fans were in attendance for the game, but this was in a 100,000 seat stadium.

Some 60 million viewers saw this game on both NBC and CBS because for some reason, nobody had this surprise championship game in mind when the NFL was dealing the broadcasting rights of the football packages to the networks, which ran one or two games each Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, no tape exists for this historic broadcast of the first championship game, which didn't get a Super title until the third matchup, the year before the merger of the AFL and the NFL.

The Packers beat the Chiefs 35-10.

In 1970, the AFL and NFL merger came as a result of an intensely competetive war between the two leagues. The familiar NFL name and logo were retained as part of the new company.

This year, almost 41 years later, this will be the first two broadcast network simulcast of an NFL game since that year, with the same networks that broadcasted the first championship game, CBS and NBC, plus the limited cable coverage of the NFL network, making it more like Two and a Half Men than Three's Company.

If Fox, which airs the NFC games, were be let in on the simulcast, it would have truly been a three network simulcast.

If more than one network were allowed to broadcast the same thing, imagine how it could impact the viewers. The Olympics could appear on NBC, My Network TV, Fox, and one independent broadcast channel, for example. CSI could be simulcast on CBS, The CW, and ION.

To be more extreme, if simulcasts could be more possible with other shows, let's not even think about the overexposure of Hannah Montana on this one. In this case, Disney Channel and ABC is enough!