The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 (SBA); (codified 15 U.S.C. §§ 1291–1295) is a U.S. federal statute that amended antitrust laws to allow professional sports leagues to pool the broadcasting rights held by all their teams and sign league-wide exclusive contracts with national television networks. It also added provisions limiting the days, times, and locations of when and where professional football games could be telecast under this antitrust exemption so they avoid competing with most high school football and college football games.
Background The Sports Broadcasting Act was passed in response to the cumulative effect of various antitrust court cases against the National Football League (NFL) dating back to the 1950s. With the advent of television, the NFL gave its teams permission to sell the broadcast rights of games to local stations in 1947. However, this caused stadium attendance to significantly drop as fans could watch the games on TV for free instead of buying tickets to see them in person. By 1949, only the Los Angeles Rams were broadcasting their home games. To address the attendance issue, the league implemented its first broadcasting blackout policy in 1951: all broadcasts on radio and television of any games in the home city of origin and on any television stations located within 75 miles (121 km) of the team's home city were blacked out (not aired), regardless of whether they were sold out, during those time periods when the teams were playing at home. Teams were also allowed to restrict home-market stations from broadcasting games in other markets during the times they were playing away games broadcast live in their home market. Even if they gave their approval for a telecast or broadcast they might otherwise have been able to permit, the NFL commissioner was still required to approve it, and did not need to give an explanation. The U.S. Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against the league over this blackout policy on grounds that it violated the Sherman Antitrust Act since the policy essentially gave the NFL unilateral power to decide where games would be broadcast instead of the individual teams. The NFL argued that the antitrust exemption for professional baseball and recently reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court applied to it. In his 1953 ruling, Judge Allan Kuhn Grim of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania declined to reach that question, holding that since antitrust law clearly applied to radio and television it applied in the instant case as well, and granted an injunction barring all those practices save the restriction on outside-market game broadcasts during home games. The Supreme Court later ruled in Radovich v. National Football League in 1957, rejecting the NFL's claim to the same antitrust exemption as baseball. In 1960, the rival American Football League (AFL) began its first season, bolstered with the help of a major network contract with ABC. The AFL's contract with ABC was the first-ever cooperative TV plan in professional football, in which the league pools the broadcasting rights by all their teams, signs a league-wide exclusive contract with a national network, and the proceeds are then divided equally among the member clubs. Attempted to duplicate the AFL's success with ABC, the NFL signed a similar contract with CBS in April 1961. The league then filed a petition with the District Court, stating that the CBS contract did not violate Judge Grim's previous 1953 ruling. Grim however disagreed, ruling that the new agreement would instead give CBS the unilateral power to decide where games would be broadcast instead of the individual teams. The NFL then lobbied Congress to override the ruling, and the Sports Broadcasting Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy on September 30.
Provisions The Sports Broadcasting Act permits certain joint broadcasting agreements among the major professional sports. It recognizes the fact that the various franchises in a sports league, while competitors in the sporting sense, are not as much business competitors as they are interdependent partners, whose success as enterprises is intertwined, as a certain level of competitive balance between them must exist for any of them to remain viable enterprises. Therefore, it permits the sale of a television "package" to a network or networks in which the league members share equally, a procedure which is common today. Of the four major North American professional team sports, the Act is most pertinent to the NFL, as all of its regular-season and playoff games are broadcast via the rights assigned to the networks via national broadcast rights packages, as opposed to local team broadcast rights as found in the other leagues. The law has been interpreted to include the aforementioned blackout rules which protect a home team from competing games broadcast into its home territory on a day when it is playing at home, and from being required to broadcast games within its home market area that have not sold out, though none of the leagues implement such rules any longer. The act withdrew antitrust immunity for any professional football telecast held on the same day that a high school or college football game is played within 75 miles (121 km) of the broadcasting station on Friday nights (after 6:00 p.m.) and Saturdays from the second Friday in September until the second Saturday in December. Because many college and high school games across the country are played within that proximity of a broadcasting station during those days and times, the NFL avoids scheduling any games during those days and times altogether.
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