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Lawmakers and appointed officials in our nation’s capital have kicked the anti-NFL sentiment into overdrive in recent weeks. FCC chairman Brendan Carr has been all over creation threatening the league’s antitrust exemption. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) urged the DOJ to investigate that exemption. Reports surfaced that the DOJ is investigating the exemption. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) sent a letter to the FCC urging the agency take action to ensure access to live sports remains affordable. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) announced she would introduce legislation designed to codify keeping sports broadcasts free within local markets.
On and on we go. Those politicians in D.C. must’ve finally found an issue that resonates with voters.
Digression aside, it’s funny to compare all the noise in D.C. to the relative silence of the NFL. The league has issued exactly one public statement regarding all of this, after reports surfaced last week that the DOJ is formally investigating the antitrust privileges granted in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
The NFL’s media distribution model is the most fan and broadcaster-friendly in the entire sports and entertainment industry. With over 87% of our games on free, broadcast television, including 100% of games in the markets of the competing teams, the NFL has for decades put our fans front and center in how we distribute our content. The 2025 season was our most viewed since 1989 and reflects the strength of the NFL distribution model and its wide availability to all fans.
That’s it. Three sentences clearly articulating why the league thinks all of this is a bit ridiculous.
But actions speak louder than words. And on Thursday, reports surfaced that YouTube is finalizing a deal with the NFL for a five-game package that will potentially include the Week 1 Australia game, the new Thanksgiving Eve contest, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.
If the NFL were truly worried about keeping games tethered to broadcast television, it’s certainly not showing it.
There’s plenty of reason for the NFL to be confident in that perspective, too. For one, the NFL has gotten away with bending the rules of its antitrust exemption for decades, as has every other professional sports league to ever sell games to cable networks. The original language of the Sports Broadcasting Act refers to “sponsored telecasting of the games,” which most interpret to mean freely accessible telecasts funded by sponsorships. Paid cable networks certainly do not fall under that category.
But perhaps more importantly, the NFL can see through D.C.’s bluster to its all-too-predictable end. The myriad lawmakers and appointees taking issue with the league are coming from a million different viewpoints. Carr thinks the NFL has run afoul of its exemption by selling too many games to streamers, threatening the health of local broadcasters that rely on NFL programming to survive. Sen. Baldwin wants to keep the framework of the Sports Broadcasting Act, including the exemption, but ensure games are freely available in local markets. Sen. Warren and Rep. Ryan barely make mention of the exemption at all, instead focusing on media consolidation as the culprit driving prices up for fans.
No one in D.C. has an actual plan. There’s no alignment. And the NFL can see right through it.
Moreover, the NFL knows how this ends if its exemption is actually rescinded. Fragmentation becomes exponentially worse as media rights revert back to individual teams, which are then free to sell games as they see fit. Cowboys games on Fox. Jaguars games on Apple TV. Saints games on Victory+. Fans become furious at the newfound complication of watching their favorite sport, and what was once a politically advantageous issue becomes political suicide overnight.
It won’t take long for the well-compensated lobbyists at the NFL’s D.C. office to convince lawmakers and agency heads of this reality.
The truth of the matter is, there’s a reason the NFL is so successful in the first place. Its antitrust exemption worked as intended. By pooling rights and implementing revenue sharing for all 32 teams, the antitrust exemption allowed the NFL to create a compelling, competitively balanced product, rather than a league where the most-popular teams are able to afford the best players and win the most games. Additionally, centralizing rights into a small handful of packages sold to a small handful of broadcasters has kept the league easy for viewers to follow. And the vast majority of those games still end up on free-to-air broadcast networks. It’s the perfect storm for creating a league as popular as the NFL.
The reported five-game YouTube package fits that ethos to a T. YouTube is perhaps the most-accessible video platform in the world, even more accessible than the traditional over-the-air broadcast networks upon which the NFL has built its empire. YouTube is the natural evolution of the NFL model for the digital age.
Are politicians really going to go after the league for putting games somewhere anyone with an internet connection can access?
Taken in totality — the disparate goals of lawmakers and officials, the fact that NFL games are already widely accessible, decades of a singular interpretation of the Sports Broadcasting Act, a dramatic increase in fragmentation if the antitrust exemption is revoked, the NFL embracing free digital platforms like YouTube — it seems silly to think the NFL could be genuinely influenced by the hubbub in Washington, D.C.
The next few months will be very telling regarding how seriously the league is taking discourse in the nation’s capital. The NFL is reportedly in active negotiations with CBS over a new media rights deal. Fox is said to be next up. Per a Thursday report by CNBC, networks and the league remain very far away on price. The NFL wants to double its current fees, while networks believe something in the neighborhood of a 25% bump is fair.
If the NFL wants to play hardball with the broadcast networks, particularly CBS, which is actually at risk of losing NFL programming due to the change-of-ownership provision triggered from Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last summer, as opposed to the rest of the networks, which are locked in through at least the 2029 season, the league can cleave more games from broadcast networks to sell to streamers. Conventional wisdom would suggest that if the legacy broadcast networks want to afford the NFL’s price hikes, they’ll need to sacrifice some amount of inventory. That seems even more true following the CNBC report.
Should that be the case — fewer games for broadcast networks and more games for streamers — perhaps we can begin calling the NFL the No Fear League, since it’ll be clear they are not scared of anything being said in D.C.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.