During more than 17 years in his job as Commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell had never testified in court during a trial. That changed last month, when he was called by the league to testify in the Sunday Ticket class action.
His comments covered 113 pages of the 2,506-page transcript. And it was largely uneventful, mainly because: (1) he didn’t have as much personal knowledge about Sunday Tickets as other witnesses who were directly involved in the negotiation of the deals with DirecTV; and (2) everything he said meshed with the bulk of the testimony that came before him.
In a nutshell, the league insisted it didn’t set the price for Sunday Ticket. The league also conceded it was a premium product, one that was intended to complement the games available at no extra cost on CBS and Fox in all markets throughout the country.
“Sunday Ticket, that’s a supplemental package,” Goodell said. “It’s a complementary package. That’s not intended for every -- a fan. They get the fan -- the fans get the broad audience, and the games are selected by CBS and FOX on Sunday afternoon. Obviously, the Sunday Ticket has whatever games are not assigned to our network partners on Sunday afternoon in those two windows. We want to make sure that that doesn’t infringe or hurt the availability of us to reach that broader audience on Sunday afternoon on CBS or FOX. . . . [I]t can impact negatively on our broadcast networks, so broadcast networks are very concerned about the impact on them in reaching the broader audience.”
Along the way, Goodell also said (as noted by the limited coverage of the trial as it was happening) that NFL Network got out of the business of producing Thursday Night Football games on its own because it wasn’t good at it.
"[W]e weren’t putting as high quality a production and -- and feed to our fans,” Goodell said. “I felt that it was not -- it was below the standard the networks had set, which I think is a very high standard, but our job was to meet that standard, and I didn’t think we were meeting that standard.”
And that was pretty much it.
The jury’s verdict indicates that it regarded the NFL’s explanation as being rooted in semantics. No, they don’t set the price. Yes, they want the price to be high, in order to protect CBS and Fox.
That point was proven, over and over again. The antitrust violation comes from the fact that 32 independent businesses used the league office to orchestrate the distribution of Sunday Ticket as a high-priced, premium product. This allowed the 32 independent businesses to maximize the fee from DirecTV for Sunday Ticket, and to maximize the fees from CBS and Fox for games available via antennas or basic cable packages.
That’s the case. And to the extent anyone would blame Goodell for the outcome, the truth is that the system was established 12 years before he became the Commissioner. The owners knew or should have known that they were stepping into a potential antitrust minefield.
It should have been obvious from the get-go. And it’s frankly amazing that it took nearly 30 years for them to trigger a $14.1 billion bomb.