While we were recovering from New Year’s Eve or watching one of the 687 bowl games on New Year’s Day, Yahoo! Sports observed:

Green Bay has perhaps the best fans in the NFL … which is why the league should be very worried that the Packers and two other teams are still struggling to sell out their playoff games.

Green Bay, as of Wednesday morning, was about 8,500 tickets short of a sellout, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Tom Silverstein. If the Packers don’t sell out by 3:40 p.m. Thursday, the game will be blacked out on local TV from Green Bay to Milwaukee. That’s almost inconceivable. The Press-Gazette said the Packers have sold out every regular-season game since 1959 (a playoff game in January of 1983, at the end of the strike-shortened season, did not). And yet they are having troubles selling out a playoff game a week after Aaron Rodgers returned from injury to beat the Bears for the NFC North title.

The Bengals produced a video with some players urging fans to buy playoff tickets, which you wouldn’t think should be necessary for a NFL playoff game. Former Bengals receiver Chad Johnson said he would buy the unsold tickets, of which there are about 8,000 according to reports, but it’s unclear if he was serious. As of Wednesday afternoon the Colts needed to sell 5,500 tickets for their game against the Chiefs before Thursday afternoon to become a sellout and avoid a local television blackout.

It would be a tremendous embarrassment to the league to have three of four playoff games blacked out locally, and likely, the tickets will get sold somehow to avoid that scenario. But there’s a bigger issue here. Is this the most stark example that NFL fans aren’t too excited to go to games anymore?

A quick glance at Ticketmaster on Wednesday afternoon showed the face-value prices for the Packers playoff game ranged from $313 and $102, not counting Ticketmaster fees. If you’ve attended a NFL game, you know that the cost doesn’t end with tickets. Parking is outrageously and insultingly high at most NFL games. Concessions aren’t cheap either. NFL teams have gouged and gouged and gouged, and maybe there’s a breaking point.

It is supposed to be a high of four degrees in Green Bay on Sunday, when the Packers play the 49ers, with a low of minus-15 degrees. Would you rather spend a few hundred dollars to sit in miserable conditions or stay at home and watch on TV, where the high-definition view is a heck of a lot better than it is better than any vantage point in the stadium? It seems that more fans are asking themselves that question, especially as the in-home experience for watching games has improved with great televisions and easy access to discuss the game with friends online.

The NFL has a serious issue on its hands when three cities are struggling to sell out a playoff game, including the Packers. All three games might sell out and the local television blackout scare will be forgotten. But the NFL better not ignore what’s happening this week. It’s not a good sign for the future.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette’s Mike Vandermause adds:

NFL rules stipulate that if the game isn’t sold out by 3:40 p.m. Thursday, or 72 hours prior to kickoff, there will be a television blackout in local markets, including Green Bay/Fox Cities, Milwaukee and Wausau. The Packers could ask for a deadline extension, and it’s believed the league would grant that request.

Packers director of public affairs Aaron Popkey said the organization remains “optimistic” the game will sell out and a TV blackout can be averted. It’s possible a corporate sponsor could step forward and buy the remaining tickets.

Even if that occurs, it’s baffling the Packers would have to go down to the wire to sell out the most important game of the season.

How could a franchise so rich in playoff tradition, with such a hardy fan base, find itself in a predicament usually reserved for NFL teams far less popular and successful?

Not counting games involving replacement players in 1987, the last time a Packers home game didn’t sell out was in January 1983 when they hosted the St. Louis Cardinals in a first-round playoff game and many disgruntled fans were turned off by a strike-shortened season.

But what excuse is there this year? The Packers won three of their last four games in dramatic fashion to capture a third straight division championship and fifth consecutive playoff berth. Plus, the return of quarterback Aaron Rodgers from a broken collarbone offers hope the Packers can do some damage in the postseason. …

There’s a combination of factors that have contributed to the Packers’ difficulty in selling tickets this week:

■ The forecast for Sunday’s game calls for a high in single digits and a below-zero wind chill. It’s understandable that instead of shelling out between $102 and $125 for a ticket to the deep freeze, a fan would rather watch the game from the comfort of a warm living room sofa on a high-definition, big-screen TV.

■ The Packers sent out playoff notices to season ticket holders during the worst part of their season when Rodgers’ return was uncertain and they were getting crushed by the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving. It’s likely many threw away their order forms thinking the Packers had no hope of earning a playoff berth.

■ The Packers overestimated the loyalty of their fan base by imposing a new no-refund playoff ticket policy in which unused money would be applied to next season’s tickets. The team also initially limited ticket sales this week to four per customer but quickly removed that restriction when it realized how slow tickets were selling.

■ The Packers added 7,000 seats to Lambeau Field this season, increasing the capacity to 80,750 and making it more difficult to sell out a game that isn’t part of the season-ticket package. It raises concerns that the Packers might have trouble filling their stadium, the third-largest in the NFL, if the team ever goes into an extended losing drought like it did in the 1970s and 1980s.

As a Packer shareholder, I got an email earlier this week:

Dear Green Bay Packers Shareholder,

The Green Bay Packers are pleased to offer an opportunity to purchase
tickets to the NFC Wild Card Game, scheduled for Jan 5th at Lambeau Field.

Tickets are available for purchase via Ticketmaster at
http://www.ticketmaster.com/Green-Bay-Packers-tickets/artist/805947

Thank you for your continued support of the Green Bay Packers. We look
forward to seeing you at Lambeau Field!

Fans younger than myself have gotten to see Packer games, wherever played, for their entire lives. So it might come as a surprise that, unless they lived within range of the Wausau or Madison CBS stations or points west, Packer fans did not get to see home games on TV before 1974, when the NFL’s current blackout policy came into existence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYVj-7Wfdeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5GB0EMx9XQ

Until 1973, the NFL blacked out TV broadcasts in teams’ home markets, which by the NFL’s definition included Green Bay and Milwaukee. From 1973 onward, home games were allowed to be broadcast only if the game was sold out within 72 hours of kickoff.

(The reason the blackout policy changed has to do with, believe it or don’t, the Packers. Green Bay’s only playoff berth in the 1970s sent the Packers to Washington. The Redskins won on the way to their first Super Bowl berth, in Super Bowl VII, but without any D.C. Redskins fans, most notably including President Richard Nixon, being able to see the games on TV. The story goes that Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, asked NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to lift the blackout, a request Rozelle refused. Kleindienst then supposedly said the Nixon administration might have to review the NFL’s antitrust exemption. However, Congress beat Nixon to the punch, passing a law the following year that led to home games on TV.)

This has been an issue a few more times than Yahoo! and Vandermause reported. Preseason games at Milwaukee County Stadium sometimes didn’t sell out, so I recall not being able to see Saturday night preseason games until the following morning on WISC-TV in Madison. There were County Stadium games in the ’80s and ’90s that didn’t sell out until the Milwaukee TV station scheduled to carry the games purchased the remaining tickets before the deadline. The station bought the tickets, of course, to avoid the blackout and losing all the revenue from the commercials it sold for the game.

That is, I predict, what will happen if the final deadline (assuming an NFL extension, which is pretty likely) arrives without the remaining 7,500 (or fewer, one assumes at this point) tickets sold. Neither WLUK-TV in Green Bay nor WITI-TV in Milwaukee wants to lose the local ad revenue from Sunday’s game. If they buy the tickets, they will make less money on the game, but less revenue is better than no revenue.

This, too, hasn’t been uncommon elsewhere in the NFL over the years. The 1958 NFL championship, claimed to be the Greatest Game Ever Played, wasn’t seen in New York. One of the greatest postseason comebacks in NFL history, Buffalo’s 38-35 overtime win over Houston …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC0XruxqQjQ

… wasn’t seen in Buffalo because the Bills didn’t sell out. One reason why the NFL hasn’t returned to Los Angeles since the departures of the Rams and Raiders is that Rams and Raiders games rarely sold out in L.A., even playoff games.

The NFL is the only professional league that has a blackout policy anymore. (Individual sports teams had their own blackout policies, however. The Chicago Blackhawks used to ban home-game broadcasts until owner William Wirtz, well, died. Wirtz’s son allowed home-game broadcasts. Wirtz’s son is much more popular in Chicago than his father was, for reasons beyond the two Stanley Cups.) The NFL obviously wants to keep people coming to the stadiums and spending money therein, particularly in all those stadiums built and renovated to make people spend money in them. For what it’s worth, the leagues that don’t have a blackout policy don’t always sell out early playoff games.

The reason the NFL’s blackout policy might have to end has to do with those new stadiums, believe it or not. In almost all cases, those stadiums have been built with significant taxpayer contribution. There is no constitutional right to watch a sporting event, but given that taxpayers, whether or not they are football fans, are paying for stadiums, that’s still a good point to bring up to politicians whose main goal is to get reelected.

I don’t think this is necessarily an ominous portent for the Packers, which could host the NFC Championship if they beat San Francisco Sunday and win their second-round game on the road. (I predict an NFC championship game at Lambeau will be sold out well before the blackout deadline.) Packer fans’ enthusiasm for the team doesn’t necessarily extend to unexpectedly spending more than $100 per ticket (plus air fare for those who can’t drive due to time or distance), immediately following the holidays, to sit outside in single-digit temperatures and below-zero wind chills, to watch a team that as recently as 10 days ago appeared to have no hope of getting into the playoffs. On the other hand, Packer tickets cost less than the league average, and Lambeau Field is one of the largest NFL stadiums. If I were part of the management team of the Bengals or Colts, I might be more disturbed, since Paul Brown Stadium is one of the smaller NFL stadiums, and Colts fans have no weather excuse given Lucas Oil Stadium’s retractable roof.

The NFL should find this disturbing too. Again, it’s right after the holidays, and playoff tickets are more expensive than regular-season tickets. But perhaps this demonstrates that the NFL’s appeal isn’t unlimited in the universe of entertainment and non-essential consumer spending. Maybe it also demonstrates that, contrary to what the Obama administration and its apologists want you to believe, the economy really isn’t good enough to spend a few hundred dollars to attend an NFL playoff game.