Days after the Chiefs beat the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII, former ESPN president John Skipper proposed a radical idea for the NFL to better monetize the Big Game: put it on pay-per-view. Former NFL quarterback and current New York radio host Boomer Esiason recently explained why he believes it will never happen.
“I assume that there are some number of people that’s the only game they watch the entire year, but they don’t want to be left out. That’s a pretty great place to be for a live event,” Skipper said on The Big Suey podcast Wednesday. “50% of the country does not want to be left out.”
“It leads me to a slightly different discussion, which is if half the country is watching your game and they’re watching it for free, how many of those people would pay a big sum of money to watch the game?”
Skipper proposed a price point of $200-$250 per household, which—even if people flocked to more high-attendance Super Bowl parties—would gain the NFL billions in revenue from the game, he says.
The idea sent some shockwaves through the sports media world during the week, but Esiason doesn’t believe the idea is anything that fans realistically have to worry about.
“The NFL has antitrust exemptions. He can say that, but there’s no way congress would allow that to happen,” he said on his WFAN/CBS Sports Network show Boomer and Gio.
“I understand what he’s talking about,” Esiason continued. “He’s all about executive thinking, about making money and more money. I think there would be a major legal fight if that happened. … There would be a class action lawsuit, most likely, probably challenging the antitrust exemption that the NFL enjoys.”
The Super Bowl is the biggest television draw in the United States every year. While it makes sense that the NFL might want to find new ways to maximize revenue from it, the potential political and public relations fallout from a move like this—which seems purely hypothetical at this point—may not be worth it.
