Loading ...The Cincinnati Bengals announced on Thursday that their game against the New York Giants will be blacked out in local markets on Sunday. They opted not to take advantage of a new NFL rule that allows teams to reduce their minimum percentage of non-premium ticket sales as low as 85%. They also opted not to buy the remaining tickets at 34 cents to the dollar in order to avoid said blackout.
For most other markets, the game will still air on FOX beginning at 1:00 PM EST. To check whether or not the game is in your market, you can visit The 506.
This will mark the first time the Bengals have been blacked out this season, and the first time the local market has been blacked out since Dec. 24, 2011, against the Arizona Cardinals.
"They’ve really come out and were loud, and it’s had an effect," Bengals coach Marvin Lewis said of the fans. "Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten it done for them, and that’s the disappointing thing."
The team was allegedly "several thousand tickets" short of a sellout.
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Because it shouldn’t have gone up yet and was pulled.
There should be a relegation rule similar to EPL: 3 blackouts and you’re out.
This comment is not because we are NY fans but to be blacked out versus a NY team is pathetic. I could understand falling a few seats short versus the Jags, but the NY Giants ? Maybe the NFL is not as popular as we all think.
This is a result of the Witches’ Brew of a terrible economy (Cincy is one of the worst-hit metropolitan economies), ticket prices that have risen too much and are now a luxury in such economies, and a team that has not played as well as expected.
Until the economy really recovers or teams re-price their tickets it will be very hard to produce regular sell-outs if you don’t field a “hot” team. As for New York, don’t kid yourself, if the Jets lose at Seattle (which I expect them to do) they would have a lot of empty seats for their next game if they hadn’t sold most of their seats through PSLs and the holders of those tickets didn’t price them way below their cost just to get rid of them on the secondary markets. New York isn’t immune to the effects of a weak economy and over-priced football. The Giants will be fine during The Manning Era, but things may look different even for them when they don’t have a great quarterback and the economy turns against them.
The NFL is not getting less popular. It’s just getting less accessible to its huge fan base. What we’re seeing at Yankee Stadium (lots of empty seats in the most expensive parts of the Stadium, making the telecasts less dramatic and thereby taking away enough “buzz” that you wind up with many thousands of empty seats for a playoff game, a phenomenon that was NEVER seen at the old Stadium) is not out of the question for any NFL team that is not competing for a championship in a given season. The scarcity value of season tickets will diminish and teams will become more reliant upon fielding good teams to maintain their stadium revenue bases and their television money (broadcast contracts will go down if the networks think “the show” is losing some of its “must see” character).
None of this HAS to happen, but it could if the league doesn’t play with its business model.
I think it has already hit the Jets to an extent. My friends who are fans say they receive weekly calls to buy season tickets…it’s freaking week 10!