So Far, Owners Happy With the NFL Network

The NFL Network's first half-season of broadcasting regular season games has been marred by often sloppy play and by ongoing staredowns with cable companies that have kept viewership lower than the league's planners originally had envisioned.

But as the league-owned network prepares to carry its eighth and final game of the season Saturday night at FedEx Field, with the Washington Redskins facing the New York Giants, the chairman of the NFL's broadcasting committee says the product has been good enough to convince him that having regular season games on the channel will be part of the sport's permanent landscape.

"I think they're doing a heck of a job with the games when you consider they're coming in as a whole new network," Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen said by telephone this week. "As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty well going to remain a staple of what we do. . . . Just speaking for myself, I'd be highly surprised if it did not continue for the foreseeable future, if not forever."

Bowlen and the broadcasting committee, including Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, made a bold move when they, along with former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, decided to put regular season games on the NFL Network this year for the first time. They could have sold the eight-game package of prime-time games on Thursday and Saturday nights in the second half of the season to a network for a rights fee worth several hundred million dollars per year. Such rights fees are the financial backbone of the league, with the NFL's deals with Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN and DirecTV bringing in nearly $4 billion annually.

Instead, Tagliabue and the owners on the committee decided to go into the game-carrying business, beginning to position themselves for a future in which games perhaps could be carried over all sorts of new digital-media devices.

"From a business standpoint, I think the NFL Network exists solely for the NFL to use as leverage against the other networks every time its TV contracts are up," said an executive from another network, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he expects to have to negotiate with the league in the future. "From a product standpoint, what they're doing is fine. It's not great yet. I'm sure it will get better. But it's certainly not terrible. They brought in experienced people from other places."

According to Bowlen, the NFL Network is not yet profitable. But that, he said, is not the point.

"If we sold the games to another carrier, we just would have gotten some more money," Bowlen said. "We don't need any more money. We've made a lot of money with our other broadcast deals. What we want is an asset."

The product that the NFL Network has put out has drawn mixed reviews. The league hired Bryant Gumbel and Cris Collinsworth as the game announcers. Gumbel was decades removed from play-by-play experience, and some viewers complain that he has been too restrained and that the broadcasts have been lifeless.

"We're better now than we were in Week 1," producer Mark Loomis said as he sat in a production truck parked outside the Georgia Dome just before the NFL Network's Dec. 16 broadcast of the Cowboys-Falcons game in Atlanta. "By the Redskins game, we'll be better."

There have been the usual headaches. The day before the game in Atlanta, which was on a Saturday night, some members of the NFL Network's broadcast crew were delayed for eight hours by bad weather in Seattle, where the network had broadcast a Thursday night game. As Gumbel and Dick Vermeil, the former NFL coach who fills in for Collinsworth when Collinsworth is unavailable because of his commitments to other networks, did pregame rehearsals hours before the kickoff in Atlanta, Vermeil was sick and his voice was so scratchy that Gumbel had to call for a glass of water with lemon and honey to be delivered.

Vermeil was busy defending Falcons Coach Jim Mora even though Mora's comments on a radio show that week about being willing to leave the team instantly if the coaching job at the University of Washington, his alma mater, ever became available had angered Falcons owner Arthur Blank. The NFL Network has demonstrated during its broadcasts that it is not beholden to the owners of the teams even though they are, in effect, the bosses. The Oakland Raiders ridiculed NFL Network reporter Adam Schefter, issuing a written statement that called him a rumor-monger with an anti-Raiders slant, after he reported during a recent broadcast that the team planned to fire Coach Art Shell after the season.