[John Corn]

This is from Bill Griffith's colum in last Sunday's Globe:
An NFL channel?

The NFL's hiring of former ESPN and ABC Sports president Steve Bornstein as a consultant has caused interesting speculation on the league's television plans. The consensus seems to be that the NFL will explore offering the ''NFL Sunday Ticket,'' now on DirecTV satellite, to digital cable. That raises the possibility of sharing added revenue from ''out of market'' games with network rights holders CBS and Fox to make it happen before the NFL TV contract expires in 2005. There's also the outside possibility the NFL will exercise its option to end that eight-year, $17.6 billion contract with CBS, Fox, and ABC/ESPN at the end of this season to begin negotiations on a new agreement. Also under consideration is the league creating its own NFL Channel ... In 28 of the NFL's local markets, league games were the highest-rated shows the past week. Pittsburgh topped the list with a 48.6 rating (65 share) for the Steelers-Raiders Sunday night game ... According to the NFL, the four highest-rated programs in the Boston market Sept. 9-15 were all NFL-related. The NFL had Patriots-Jets (29.3), Patriots-Steelers (27.6), Bills-Vikings (19.5), and Channel 5's Sept. 9 Patriots pregame (13.4). However, ATT numbers researcher extraordinaire Sarah Nastasi pointed out that the season premiere of HBO's ''The Sopranos'' came in at No. 4 at 14.0 ... Bills quarterback Drew Bledsoe(that combination still doesn't roll smoothly off the keyboard) subjects himself to the two-minute drill of personal questions on Fox's ''NFL Under the Helmet'' tomorrow at noon (Channel 25). Bledsoe is also the topic of a ''Sunday NFL Countdown'' piece (11 a.m.-1 p.m. on ESPN) by Greg Garber. On the same show, Andrea Kremer looks at Bill Belichick 's motivational techniques

 

[Mike]

Will ending the contract with the networks really be the answer the NFL wants? To upset the networks?? NBC has said they don't want to be in the NFL game anymore. That leaves CBS, ABC and FOX. Does the WB and UPN have enough money to buy into the NFL? That would be interesting with the superstations. Lots and lots and lots of speculation right now. All I know for sure is that DirecTV will lose customers if they don't have the NFL package anymore. I won't totally go back to cable for any reason, but if the Sunday Ticket isn't on DirecTV and/or c-band then I have no choice to get the Sunday Ticket via cable. I won't drop the little dishes totally even if I just kept the basic cheapest channel package to get the east coast network feeds. It's shortly after 7:00pm PT on Saturday and I've already seen Big Brother, AMW and the Miss America pageant is well underway not to mention the Yankees game earlier that was on FOX 5, Mets game on the WB and the Panthers game on WWOR.

DirecTV should pay whatever in reason to the highest degree without going bankrupt to keep the DirecTV package. I think that will happen once common sense takes over. I'm just worried someone like at Dish if the merger goes through might end the packages in the future. Charlie doesn't always like to pay top dollar for sports programming. If Charlie could get OTA feeds in the baseball package then I'll love Charlie forever.