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Tampa Bay Buccaneers Are Blacked Out on Local TV as NFL Season Kicks Off
National Football League fans in Florida’s Tampa Bay area won’t see their hometown Buccaneers on local television as the season hits full stride this weekend.
The Buccaneers, coming off a 3-13 season, weren’t able to sell all the tickets for their Sept. 12 home opener against the Cleveland Browns, the team said in a statement.
Under the NFL’s blackout rules, if a home team doesn’t sell out tickets 72 hours before kickoff, the game can’t be aired in the local market. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said it didn’t appear that any other teams were in danger of having a local TV blackout during the league’s opening weekend.
The NFL’s blackout policy was instituted to encourage fans to come to the stadium and buy tickets to games. When a game is blacked out, it’s not available on local stations or the DirecTV Sunday Ticket package to any households or businesses within 75 miles of the home team’s stadium.
There were 22 blackouts last year, up from nine in 2008.
The increase is a likely combination of a struggling economy and the costs of attending a game relative to watching it on television. The average price of taking a family of four to a Buccaneers game last season was $399.40, according to Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index. The NFL average for the 2009 season was $412.64, a figure that includes four average-price tickets, two small beers, four small sodas, four hot dogs, parking, two game programs and two hats.
The NFL’s season begins tonight in New Orleans, where the Super Bowl-champion Saints host the Minnesota Vikings in a game nationally televised on General Electric Co.’s NBC. The Buccaneers’ game is one of 13 on Sept. 12 and will be carried by CBS Corp.’s CBS network.
To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Matuszewski in New York at matuszewski@bloomberg.net
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