The NFL built a $100-billion broadcast empire on an antitrust exemption Congress handed it in 1961 — and now that Congress wants Roger Goodell to explain it under oath, the commissioner is reportedly taking a pass.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan sent Goodell a letter this week inviting him to a June 10 hearing on the NFL’s television deals and whether they still square with the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. According to a report from NBC Sports, Goodell will “politely decline.” Because the invitation is not a subpoena, he is free to say no, and he was asked to make his intentions known by June 3. The league’s choice is its right. It is also a tell.
The law at the center of it
The Sports Broadcasting Act is now 65 years old, and it is the quiet foundation of the modern NFL. The statute grants professional leagues a limited antitrust exemption, letting them pool the media rights of every team and sell them as a single package rather than competing against one another. That is why the NFL can negotiate one colossal national deal instead of 32 separate ones. But the law was written for over-the-air broadcast networks in the Kennedy era, and courts have repeatedly held that it does not extend to cable, satellite, or streaming. The league has spent the last several years pushing more and more games onto exactly those platforms.
Why the timing is dangerous for the league
This hearing is not happening in a vacuum. The Justice Department is examining potential anticompetitive practices in how leagues sell their games, and fans are increasingly angry that watching a full slate now means stacking up paywalled subscriptions across a half-dozen services. The NFL’s defense — that a 1961 broadcast exemption justifies a 2026 streaming business — is exactly the argument that gets weaker the more it is said out loud in a committee room. Sitting for hours of hostile questioning, on the record, while regulators take notes, is a risk with very little upside for a commissioner who already holds the better hand. Declining keeps the league’s reasoning in friendly press releases instead of an adversarial transcript.
The case for the NFL — and why it falls short
Give the league its strongest argument: this is a voluntary invitation, not a legal demand, and congressional hearings are often political theater designed to generate clips rather than policy. Executives skip them routinely and send written statements or lower-level surrogates instead. Goodell has no obligation to show, and a single afternoon of grandstanding would not, by itself, change a word of the statute. All true. But it misses the point. The antitrust exemption is not something the NFL earned in the market; it is a privilege Congress granted and Congress can revisit. When the body that gave you that gift asks you to account for how you have used it, treating the request as optional sends a message of its own — that public accountability ends where the league’s convenience begins. And practically, the empty chair becomes the story. Jordan gets to point at it.
Why it matters
The NFL is betting that its leverage is strong enough to wait this out, and it may well be right in the short term. No single hearing rewrites the Sports Broadcasting Act. But the exemption that makes the league’s entire media model possible is now openly in play, with the DOJ circling and fans souring on the cost of access. A commissioner confident in his position could have walked in and defended it. Choosing silence instead does not make the questions disappear. It just guarantees someone else gets to answer them.