National Football League television blackout policies

The National Football League television blackout policies are the strictest television blackout policies among the four major professional sports leagues in North America. From 1973 through 2014, the NFL maintained a blackout policy that states that a home game cannot be televised in the team's local market if all tickets are not sold out 72 hours prior to its start time. This makes the NFL the only major professional sports league that requires teams to sell out tickets in order to broadcast a game on television locally. Although nationally-televised games in the other leagues are often blacked out on the national networks on which the game is airing in the local markets of the participating teams, they can still be seen on the local broadcast TV station or regional sports network that normally holds their local/regional broadcast rights. The league blackout policy has been suspended on a year-to-year basis since 2015.

Prior to 1973, all games were blacked out in the home city of origin and on any TV stations located within 75 miles of the team's home city, regardless of whether they were sold out. This policy, dating back to the NFL's emerging television years, resulted in home-city blackouts even during sold-out regular-season games and championship games. For instance, the 1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants was unavailable to viewers in the New York City market despite the sellout at Yankee Stadium (many fans rented hotel rooms or visited friends in areas of Connecticut or Pennsylvania where signals of TV stations carrying the game were available to watch the game on television, a practice that continued for Giants games through 1972). Similarly, all Super Bowl games prior to Super Bowl VII in January 1973 were not televised in the host city's market.

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