BOB GARFIELD: The Super Bowl is upon us. The National Football League is expected to pull in an astonishing 3.7 billion dollars from the TV networks that air its games. That's a lot more than these networks will recoup by selling ad time, math that wouldn't make much sense, expect that over time the NFL has become much more than just a ratings powerhouse. It's also become a prerequisite for network health.

Here to explain this is New York Times business writer, Joe Nocera. Joe, welcome to On the Media.

JOE NOCERA: Thanks for having me. Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Geronimo Communications UK oo why do they keep bidding more and more to get these rights?

JOE NOCERA: The reason they do it is because as cable becomes more and more important and as television becomes narrower and narrower, there are not that many venues that bring together large groups of people, particularly men, in one place the way television used to do it in the old days when there were only three networks.
BOB GARFIELD: This phenomenon seems to trace back to 1993, when what was then the dinky little Fox Network doubled CBS's bid for the rights to broadcast the NFC games. What happened to Fox after that, and what happened to CBS?

JOE NOCERA: Well, first of all, it put Fox on the map. I mean, it really made Fox a real network. Nobody denies that. And there were actually affiliate stations that defected from CBS to Fox just because of football.

CBS, meanwhile, not only lost affiliate stations but they saw their ratings tank. And, you know, you think to yourself, well, maybe it's coincidence. But then CBS got football back a few years later and its ratings started to go up again.

BOB GARFIELD: That's the environment, but add to it one other factor – the NFL Network, a relatively obscure cable network that's mostly, I guess, on digital cable, not on basic cable, which, up until this year, anyway, hadn't aired any actual NFL games. This year, the NFL did take games – I think eight of them – and, instead of selling them to a broadcast network, put them on the NFL Network, which, you know, very few people have access to. What's going on there?

JOE NOCERA: Well, the NFL wants to use these games as leverage, as power, to force the cable stations, Comcast and Time Warner Cable and those companies, to put the NFL Network on their basic cable for a lot of money. Right now, the NFL Network charges, I think, 25 cents per subscriber, and if they could force the cable companies to take these games on cable television, they want to charge 70 cents per subscriber per month.

I mean it's a game of chicken between the cable companies, which are very resistant to this, and the NFL, which is basically insisting on it.

BOB GARFIELD: In your piece in The Times, you quoted an analyst as saying that the NFL is trying to create a "perception of scarcity." Another way of putting it is – extortion?

JOE NOCERA: Extortion by football? How now, Bob?

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS]

JOE NOCERA: They know that football's really popular, they know that people really want it, and they know that cable companies are very unpopular in the public mind. So their thought was: if we offer this wonderful package of football games, the football-loving population would rise up and demand it, and the cable companies would cower and crater.

The truth of the matter is, as a general rule, the content providers usually win these battles. I mean, think about Disney versus Time Warner. I mean, think about the various battles revolving around that. This year the cable companies did not crater, but ultimately I think they will, just because they'll have to.

BOB GARFIELD: Can you foresee a circumstance in which the NFL, as popular as it and as good as the product is that it delivers, just simply overplays its hand?

JOE NOCERA: In a word, no. I mean the NFL has a history of playing this stuff beautifully. I just do not think they will do something that will devalue their currency.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Joe. Thank you so much.

JOE NOCERA: Thanks a lot, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Joe Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.