Of the major pro sports (baseball, basketball, hockey, football), only football is broadcast on a regular basis on over-the-air (OTA) television such as ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC. Everything else usually requires access to a cable station. A network may show an occasional game on a weekend, but (by my estimate), 95% of baseball, basketball, and hockey are not OTA, yet (again, my estimate), about 85% of pro football is OTA.
Even so, when the Patriots play on Monday nights, the Boston ABC affiliate broadcasts the game for OTA only viewers. I assume this happens in other markets as well??? Are any pro football games other than Monday Night broadcast only on cable?
Yet, when we get to the playoffs, especially the finals, everything shifts to OTA. Fox has the AL playoffs as well as the World Series this year and (I believe) the Stanley Cup and NBA finals were on broadcast television.
Has any NFL playoff game been cable-only?
So why does football treat OTA television differently than other pro sports? And why does everybody else shift to broadcast television at the end (and only the end) of the season?
In the NFL, the league negotiates a common contract for all teams, both regular and post-season. One of the clauses in that contract (and it’s been there for something like 50 years) is that when a game is sold out, it will be offered for broadcast in its local market.
In MLB, local teams own their own rights for the regular season. Some will sell the rights to OTA broadcast, some to cable systems, some to a mix. The rights to post-season games belong to MLB, who divides them up anyway it wants.
When a team plays on cable the NFL allows a channel in the teams home market to rebroadcast the ESPN/NFL Network feed over-the-air so that people in that market without cable can watch the game. (Though of course, if the game isn’t a sellout, the home team market folks get blacked out both on cable and broadcast TV).
Specifically, by the NFL Network, which is owned by the league (though, as with Monday Night Football on ESPN, the NFLN games are also run on over-the-air stations in the home regions of the teams playing in those games).
In answer to the OP’s question: I don’t believe that we’ve yet had an NFL playoff game on cable, though I may be mistaken (it’s possible that there’s been a first-round game on ESPN at some point).
There haven’t been any NFL playoff games on cable.
The issue here is the number of games. Each NFL team plays just 16 games, and about 90% of the games are played on the weekends (ie, not prime time). They’re a very attractive option for the broadcast networks.
NHL and NBA teams play 80 games, and MLB teams play 162. The vast majority of them are on weekday nights. This makes them completely undesirable for national broadcast networks but a very attractive product for regional cable networks.
Although you’re obviously talking about the United States, I just wanted to point out that this isn’t quite true in Canada. There is a regular Saturday night broadcast of OTA hockey on the CBC, the national broadcaster (although technically everything is switching to digital television in this country, it’s still available with a converter box as a basic/free channel). If I understand correctly, Rogers Sportsnet acts as a local OTA provider of NHL games 5 of the 7 NHL markets (with TSN/RDS having the Habs and Jets rights). TSN/RDS are NOT OTA though; you need a cable subscription for these channels.
It is true, however, that the majority of games are on TSN as they own the national rights. I think the CBC has the rights to playoff games involving Canadian teams, TSN/RDS have everything else (on RDS, the regular season has all the Habs games and some 20-odd Senators games, IIRC).
Also, NBC has picked up 100-odd games starting with the Winter Classic, so hockey fans in the States will get some regular-season NHL games after January 2nd.
Oh, I didn’t realize that. That is unfortunate. Hockey fans really have it tough in the States; even with the NBC/Versus cable deal it’s so hard to get games, it seems!
Tonight I have the choice of either of the two games being played in the league, 3/4 of tomorrow’s games, though only two on Thursday…
And local teams may have their own broadcast deals with local stations- although most Mets games are broadcast by SNY, about 25 or so are carried by WPIX , a local OTA station and I think about the same number of Yankees games are shown on WOR ,another local station
There’s a third type of television–over-the-air but non-network. Originally, these stations were prime outlets for non-football sports, for the reasons given by anson2995–other sports play more frequently and on weeknights (prime time for the major networks).
When I grew up in Chicago, every Cubs game was on WGN, every White Sox game was on WFLD (a UHF channel), and the Bulls and Blackhawks road games (home games weren’t televised, for fear of harming attendance) were on either WGN or various UHF stations. All the networks showed, even then, was pro football, post-season baseball games, and a weekend “game of the week” for baseball, football, and (for a time) hockey.
With the advent of cable TV, some but not all of the WGN and UHF games moved to cable networks. But even today, WGN and WCIU carry a large number of Cubs and White Sox games over the air.
Wish the OP had posted this a day earlier. I don’t have ESPN in HD, and could have watched the Lions in High Def if I’d known.