Just before Sunday night’s game, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told a group of fans that football on TV — and HDTV especially — may be the biggest problem the game has right now.
TV has done such a good job of bringing the game into people’s living rooms that he is starting to worry that attendance at the games will begin to suffer.
“One of our biggest challenges in the league is the experience at home,” Goodell told the fan group just before the Falcons-Cowboys game.
And “HD is only going to get better,” he said.
The question about TV vs. stadium attendance came up because Atlanta is debating building a new facility to replace the 20-year-old Georgia Dome.
Goodell is encouraging the city to back a $1 billion stadium to open sometime in 2017.
Attendance at NFL games had been declining over the past four years.
But this year, the league says, it is bouncing back.
(Only four games out of 132 so far this season have been blacked out on TV for lack of a sell-out, the leagues says. But the league instituted new rules this year that makes it easier to get a blackout lifted.)
“Attendance so far this year is 97 percent,” says the spokesman. “We’d like that to be 100 percent.
“But what the commissioner is saying is that the TV experience has now become so good that we are starting to compete with ourselves,” says the spokesman.
“It is something we are looking at.”