By Gregg Easterbrook @ TheWeeklyStandard.com, Oct. 30

[....] Now here’s the punchline: ESPN pays twice as much for bad games as NBC pays for good ones. ESPN sends the NFL a check for $1.9 billion each year, while NBC sends $950 million annually. Yet every year at schedule-release time, NBC receives a better slate of games than ESPN, even though NBC gets to air the Super Bowl every third year and ESPN never does. What’s going on?

A primary factor here is that the NFL’s feudal-elite owners really hate ESPN. They are jealous of its prime real estate on cable [....]

The owners think that without the NFL, ESPN would be much less appealing to cable carriers. They’re right. But ESPN also was first to the idea of national cable sports. The NFL wasn’t there first. ESPN also had the basic idea of treating sports as entertainment—adding humor and commentary—back when the NFL took itself oh-so-seriously. ESPN’s money and success at sports drive the feudal-elite NFL owners crazy in a way they aren’t about NBC, which existed long before cable and whose primary business is not sports.

NFL Network was launched in 2003 [....]