The NFL Continues To Rob Us All Blind, Now Forcing Bars To Switch To Streaming Services In Order To Show Sunday Ticket. Roger Goodell Was Called In Front Of Congress To Explain and Pulled A No-Call, No-Show.
Fox Business- The traditional American pastime of gathering at a local sports bar to watch Sunday football is being strangled by a technical and financial bottleneck, one restaurateur is warning.
"It's why we're speaking up, because the simple matter is that it is hard to watch all of the streaming things… Is it on YouTube TV? Is it the [NFL] Sunday Ticket? Is it Amazon?" Texas restaurateur and Tailgators Pub & Grill founder Jim Hallers said on "Varney & Co." Friday.
"For the last 30 years, it's come to us through DirecTV, and it's just worked," he continued. "And so we like a centralized approach, but we just need technology that works, and streaming is still very immature."
Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Hallers explained to lawmakers that the sports media landscape's sudden fragmentation into separate streaming apps is creating an expensive tech maze for hospitality venues, threatening the business model of – often-rural – neighborhood pubs that rely on NFL fans to keep their doors open in the fall.
Wednesday’s congressional hearing stemmed from the Iowa Restaurant Association and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, which each represent thousands of independent restaurant and bar owners, sending letters to high-powered GOP lawmakers in their states urging them to act on "a significant shift in the commercial distribution of NFL Sunday Ticket that threatens to impose immediate and substantial burdens on small businesses" across their states.
The concern comes after streaming service EverPass Media announced it would become the exclusive commercial option for NFL Sunday Ticket starting with the 2026 season. The Iowa letter was sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, while the Wisconsin edition went to Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust.
A couple of months ago Roger Goodell got a letter from the United States Congress. Come sit down, they said. Explain to us, under oath, why a man can't watch his own football team anymore without taking out a second mortgage.
He said, thanks, but no thanks.
Cited "ongoing litigation." Lol.
Which is lawyer-speak for- I would rather chew glass than answer that out loud.
So the hearing happened without him. June 10. No Goodell, no NFL guy at all, just an empty chair with the league's name on it and a room full of congressmen from both parties who showed up with zero fucking clue what they were listening to because the only thing congress people know anything about, is how to line their own pockets. When it comes to technology, law and order, finance, or anything that actually pertains to the well being of their constituents, they couldn't be more out of fucking touch.
But you know what happens to an empty chair in a room like that. It gets dragged.
No one there to object, no one to spin, no one to do the little 87 PERCENT OF OUR GAMES ARE FREE soft shoe bullshit.
Just a public beating on C-SPAN with no one in the building to take it.
And honestly? Good. Couldn't happen to a nicer monopoly.
I was actually discussing this with my coworker Jon Gruden the other day in the office (ever heard of him?).
The most fucked up part about this entire sordid "anti-trust" ordeal is that they were GIVEN this. All of it.
Let's take it back to 1961.
The NFL wasn't the Death Star yet, not even close. It was just a wobbly little operation just trying to survive, and Congress does it a giant solid. Passes the Sports Broadcasting Act, basically says fine, we'll let all your teams gang up and sell their TV rights as one big blob, which is the exact thing that gets a normal company raided by the feds, and in return you keep the games on free TV so any slob with an antenna can watch his squad.
That was the deal.
Sixty-five years later the wobbly little league is a hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar media monster, the free games keep disappearing behind a new paywall every August, and the NFL is standing there on the torn-up wrapper of the gift Congress handed them going , "gee golly gosh, what's everybody so upset about?"
And the way they pull all this bullshit off is so cynical it's almost art.
The report Goodell skipped town to avoid spells it out on page 18.
ESPN reportedly comes to the league and says hey, what if Sunday Ticket was like $70 bucks for the whole year.
Yes. Seventy.
Very reasonable. And very human.
And the NFL says absolutely not, too cheap.
A piece of shit in a four-thousand-dollar suit looked at the number $70 and got offended on behalf of the shareholders.
But wait, it gets way worse.
For DECADES people have begged for one simple thing- just let us buy just our team. Just my team.
I'm a Pats guy stranded in Chicago, I don't need the all-you-can-eat platter, I need New England and I need to not bankroll a Panthers-Saints game I would not watch if you paid me.
The league killed that option dead.
Because if you let people buy only what they want, they buy less, and the NFL would rather you choke down the entire bundle and thank them for it.
And the bleakest, funniest, most fucked up detail of the whole report is their own data.
The league's numbers show most Sunday Ticket buyers aren't film-room psychos who need every snap. They're regular people like you and me, just trying to follow one out-of-market team. But we end up buying the whole cow to get one glass of milk, because the NFL flat-out refuses to sell just the milk.
A jury already looked at this in 2024 and put a number on it. $4.796 billion.
With a B.
Said yeah, that's illegal, cut the check.
Then a judge vacated it, which the House report calls the wrong call, so the money's floating in purgatory.
But you can't unring that bell fucko. Twelve normal humans heard the case and came back guilty.
So at the hearing, with the league cowering under the bleachers, OutKick's Clay Travis gets up and just starts teeing off.
(Sidebar- I think Clay Travis is one of the biggest frauds going, because I remember who he was before the Outkick days, but major, major respect to him on this. He did his homework and went fucking off on the NFL.)
Guy did the actual math out loud. Want to follow ONE team for a full season now? Sunday Ticket plus Amazon for Thursdays plus Peacock plus Spend plus YouTube TV plus whatever else they cooked up over the summer, and you're staring at $575 to almost $800. Just to fucking watch football. The thing that was supposed to be free.
He called it "unlawful pay-per-view" and I genuinely cannot get the phrase out of my head.
But here's where I stop being a guy simply yelling at his TV and start being a guy who signs the checks.
Because there's a second victim in all this nobody outside the business ever thinks about. The neighborhood bar.
Aka my entire world outside of Barstool.
A Texas bar owner named Jim Hallers got up at that same hearing and testified my exact life into the congressional record without ever learning my name.
Starting in 2026, the only legal way for a bar to show Sunday Ticket is through one company.
EverPass.
They have the exclusive. No more DirecTV, and no backup, no shopping around.
One door, and they hold the only key.
And the door is a fucking catastrophe.
For 30 years it was a DirecTV box behind every TV and it just worked. Flip it on, games come in, you pour beer, the room is happy.
Now it's streaming.
Hallers explained it perfect.
Your average bar has 30, 40 TVs.
You cannot just slap an EverPass box behind each one, that is not how streaming works, you try to run 40 streams at once and your internet wimpers and dies floor like it got shot.
So you need real commercial hardware to make it go. And the hardware is not cheap.
That hardware is called "the switch" and every bar owner is well familiar with the name, and fucking dreads it.
As Hallers told Congress one commercial video switch can run north of fifteen grand.
The full upgrade, gear and wiring and labor, lands between $30,000 and $40,000. PER bar.
Per. Bar.
So as a bar owner, you're spending forty thousand dollars to do the exact same thing you already did fine last year, which was put the football game on the television.
(Sidebar- You have not lived until your stream drops at 1:15 on a Sunday with a packed house and 100 drunk grown men turn around in unison and look at you like you told them to fuck their mother. Fear and panic on a whole other level.)
It's not about the price, he said, we just want technology that works, and that's what they took away from us.
That's the whole thing right there. We are not crying poor. We are crying because they took something that WORKED, smashed it, and mailed us the repair bill.
And here is Everpass' bullshit PR response to the whole thing-
"We understand that transitioning to a streaming-based solution for NFL Sunday Ticket may require planning, from connectivity and hardware to overall venue readiness. That’s why our team is committed to helping customers make the transition with confidence and be fully prepared before kickoff. Our goal is simple: make sure your venue is ready well before the first Sunday of the season, so you can focus on what matters most: delivering a great experience for every guest who walks through the door," EverPass’ website reads.
This hearing only happened because real bars begged for it.
The Iowa and Wisconsin restaurant associations, thousands of little independent spots, wrote letters to their senators basically pleading with them that please, this Sunday Ticket switch is going to bury us before we even get to kickoff. This wasn't mega corporations. It was the places where the local bar IS the whole town's Sunday. That's who the richest league on the planet looked at and decided to flatten.
And shockingly, this wasn't red versus blue. Republicans hammered the monopoly, Democrats hammered the prices and the streaming maze, one Fox host called the whole exemption flat out "un-American."
When the most divided Congress in living memory all spins around and points at the same guy, the guy is the problem. And that guy's name is Roger Goodell.
I'm not buying the confused-little-billionaire act, and neither should you.
They knew.
Of course they fucking knew.
They knew when they spiked the $70 package.
And they knew when they killed buy-your-own-team. Because why else would they have buried their own data?
And they know it now when they're fighting a $4.8 billion verdict.
And they fucking knew it when they handed me and every other bar a forty-thousand-dollar bill to change absolutely nothing, just for the ability to show NFL games on Sundays.
And again, what sums this entire thing up was knowing that Goodell read the invite from Congress, glanced at the litigation, and decided the smart move was to simply not exist that day.
It's a machine built on one single bet- which is that we love this stupid beautiful sport too much to ever walk away from it.
And the sad part is they're right.
We're all gonna pay the forty grand. And I'm gonna pay the Sunday Ticket at home too, like a fucking sucker- like a man who believes the stripper when she tells him she likes him, and then tips her on her way out the door.
We'll be there in September with all 40 TVs lit, a beer in our hands, watching the Pats, broke and furious and completely, hopelessly in.
Like Rush Probst says, we'll see you Sunday.
Bring your wallet. And bring your other wallet.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BARS!