Last Saturday, of lot of footballs fans missed what will surely go down as the "Peacock Game." Not the Heidi Game or the Ice Bowl, I suppose. But it was a marquee Wild-Card weekend playoff contest-- one that was unexpectedly walled off from the viewing public, all because the NFL sold the game to a mega media conglomerate, NBCUniversal, which wanted to use it to attract new subscribers for Peacock, its paid streaming service, which features French bike racing and 19 zillion reruns of Law & Order.
The Chiefs-Dolphins game remained available over the air, for free, in the Kansas City and Miami area, however. But if you are anywhere else in the country (and didn’t ante up for Peacock), allow me to inform you that the Chiefs are back, routing Miami 26-7. I don’t know if the defending Super Bowl champs are all the way back, but they’re back enough that I’d be worried about playing them next. Andy Reid is doing clever Andy Reid stuff and Patrick Mahomes has the Patrick Mahomes Look.
The weather was almost a bigger story than Peacock, with the game at Arrowhead was played in subzero temperatures—minus four at kickoff. It was very cold, cold enough that Andy Reid’s mustache quickly froze with icicles, making the 65-year old coach’s face look like an arctic walrus. Miami played numb.
Mahomes even cracked his helmet on a feisty run, a sliver of red plastic flying skyward like a rental car bumper. As for Swift, she was there, celebrating in a toasty skybox, tucked between Mahomes’s wife, Brittany, and Travis' mother, Donna. Earlier in the week, the analyst and former coach Tony Dungy blamed the coverage of Swift for “disenchanting” NFL fans-- a load of BS, considering that NFL ratings are up big (likely due in part to Swift), and Dungy was about to work The Peacock Game, perhaps the most single-handedly disenchanting programming decision in league history.
On The Peacock Game, I hate to admit it-- but we should expect more. Television is in decline, at least the old way of watching: the cable “bundle” is dwindling, replaced by streamers like Amazon Prime, Max, Peacock, etc. These companies need to grow, and it makes sense that they would try and weaponize the one thing on television everyone still watches: the NFL. And that’s what NBCUniversal wants to know: if fans will love it enough to pay them for it.
The streamer
announced Sunday
that 23 million people watched the game, a figure Peacock admitted includes
those local audiences who watched it on local affiliates in K.C. and Miami (not via streaming). So we don't know for a fact whether the cash-grab was successful or not-- they will almost certainly make another attempt at it.
Alas, this is our new reality. You’re paying Amazon if you’re been watching Thursday Night Football, Sunday Ticket is off to YouTube, and as cable continues to bleed subscribers, more streaming games are sure to follow. The NFL’s desire for every eyeball has to recognize the new realities of modern media, if it wants the dollars. And I mean serious dollars-- Peacock reportedly paid $110 million for its playoff game. For football fans shut out of the Chiefs-Dolphins game, that is cold comfort.
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