NFL commissioner Roger Goodell declined an invitation to appear at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 10 about the league’s broadcast and streaming deals.
According to a letter sent from NFL general counsel Ted Ullyot to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), on Wednesday, Goodell will not be able to participate “due to ongoing litigation related to the topic of the hearing.”
Ullyot’s two-page letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Athletic, was written in response to Jordan’s June 1 request for Goodell to testify at the hearing entitled “Examining the Sports Broadcasting Act.” According to Jordan’s letter to Goodell, the hearing will examine the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and “the ways in which the distribution of professional sports has evolved” and how the antitrust exemption created by the SBA “has been used by the professional sports leagues to harm consumers.”
The federal statute allows pro sports leagues the ability to pool their teams’ television rights and sell them collectively as one package without violating antitrust laws.
The original statute was designed for “sponsored telecasting,” or free over-the-air TV broadcasts. But as leagues have shifted to using paywalls and subscription streaming services for some games, federal regulators have examined whether their antitrust exemption should still apply.
The Department of Justice in April opened an investigation into whether the NFL is engaging in anticompetitive tactics and overcharging customers.
That came on the heels of a letter that Sen. Mike Lee of Utah — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights — sent to the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission in March requesting a review of the NFL’s antitrust exemption. Lee argued that the NFL’s current distribution model, with games simultaneously streamed on subscription platforms and cable networks, “differs substantially from the conditions that precipitated” the SBA’s antitrust exemption.
The NFL defended its model in April by noting that more than 87 percent of games are primarily distributed on free broadcast TV and all games are available on free over-the-air broadcasts in the markets of competing teams — two points Ullyot reiterated in his letter to Jordan on Wednesday.
The Athletic has reached out to Jordan’s office for comment on Ullyot’s letter and Goodell’s declining to testify. This story will be updated if he responds.
Ullyot also noted in his letter that from 2022 through 2026, the NFL’s broadcast distribution has been generally flat, ranging from 87.3 percent to 87.0 percent, despite an erosion in cable television distribution and a rise in streaming services across the U.S. in that span.
“The NFL’s decision to license a few more games to widely adopted streaming services is simply a reflection that those platforms now offer significantly more reach than the current pay TV ecosystem and that broadcast television remains the foundation of our media distribution,” Ullyot wrote.
Ullyot added that the SBA is “important for competitive balance in the NFL.”
“If the league were not to handle media distribution as it has since the passage of the SBA, the result would be to harm NFL fans through increased cost and confusion and the undermining of the competitive balance that makes NFL games so exciting,” Ullyot wrote. “By contrast, under the current SBA-driven model, this past season saw the second-highest viewership in the NFL’s history. Fans continue to embrace how our games are offered.”