Vacation be damned, I’m making time to trudge through the 2,506-page Sunday Ticket trial transcript. And I’ll be posting items regarding specific portions of the testimony and other developments of interest.
Many of the witnesses testified through prerecorded depositions. Unfortunately, none were included in the official transcript. (Then again, that probably kept it from being 4,000 pages long.) After former NFL Media chief Steve Bornstein testified over the second and third day of the trial, various depositions were played — including one given by Patriots owner Robert Kraft and one by NFL Media executive Hans Schroeder.
Next came, live in court, one of the named plaintiffs in the case. A New Orleans native who moved to California, Robert Lippincott purchased Sunday Ticket to watch Saints games.
Lippincott easily established some of the key, but also obvious, facts of the case. He said he would have bought a package that included only Saints games, but that wasn’t available. He said he had to purchase a DirecTV subscription along with Sunday Ticket.
And he was willing to do it because it was important for him to watch the Saints.
“It matters to me,” he said. “You know, life’s hard. And they’re my every Sunday, no matter what, like I said, win or lose, there’s pleasure, there’s joy. You know, you laugh, you cry. That’s the best thing about football.”
And that’s the kind of passion that the NFL tapped into when overpricing Sunday Ticket. The most avid fans are the ones who got screwed, because those who didn’t have the same passion simply didn’t buy the package.
That was the sweet spot the NFL hoped to engineer. Charge enough so that only the most ardent fans will find a way to pay for it, even though they shouldn’t have had to pay that much because the NFL (as the jury determined) violated antitrust laws by working together to jack up the price so that more fans would watch the games on local CBS and Fox affiliates, keeping the ratings of the traditional networks high.
Even if the NFL finds a way to avoid $14 billion in liability to those who paid the overinflated price from 2011 through 2022, the league can’t escape the fact that it forced the biggest fans of pro football to pay much more than they needed to pay, so that fans who lacked the same commitment wouldn’t buy it at a much more affordable price.
That’s the most important thing to remember when it comes to the league’s position that Sunday Ticket was a premium service. The premium was aimed not at reflecting the value of the package but at excluding those who, if they didn’t purchase Sunday Ticket, would just shrug their shoulders and watch the games served to their local markets by CBS and Fox.