House Judiciary Committee challenges NFL’s “87 percent” claim about free over-the-air access

The House Judiciary Committee has moved to publicly dispute one of the NFL’s most repeated media-distribution talking points, arguing that the league’s “87 percent” figure does not reflect how many games are realistically available to the average viewer at home.

According to a House Judiciary interim staff report circulated ahead of a hearing on the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, the NFL “explains” that 100 percent of its local-market games are free over-the-air in the teams’ home areas and that 87 percent of games have “primary distribution” on broadcast television. The report then challenges the way the NFL defines and uses that metric.

The staff report claims that the NFL’s own analysis shows the average NFL game appears in only 39 percent of U.S. households. It also points to a historical breakdown, stating that of the NFL’s 256 regular-season games in 2016, 113 were broadcast in markets that reached less than 20 percent of U.S. households. The committee argues that “primary distribution” as the NFL uses it can mean the game is on a broadcast station somewhere, not that it is accessible to a consumer in a given week and geographic area.

The NFL has consistently argued that its distribution approach is built around free, over-the-air broadcast television. In earlier correspondence ahead of the hearing, the league said it was “approximately 87 percent of all NFL games” that are primarily distributed via free broadcast, and that all games are available free over-the-air in the competing teams’ home markets. The league also linked its media model to the Sports Broadcasting Act and described free over-the-air as the “primary source” for most games.

In the committee’s framing, the practical consumer experience is different from the headline number. The report’s conclusion, as described in the coverage, effectively separates “availability somewhere” from “availability to the viewer,” arguing that fewer than half of games are actually accessible on broadcast television depending on where fans live and which week they tune in.

The dispute lands as Congress intensifies oversight of NFL media rights, streaming, and whether the league’s control over distribution harms consumers. It also follows reports that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell declined an invitation to testify, with the league citing ongoing litigation tied to the 1961 law. That choice has not stopped the committee from pressing its case through staff analysis and hearings.

For fans and teams, the immediate stakes are policy and bargaining leverage, not on-field performance. Still, the direction of travel matters, because any legislative or regulatory pressure could alter how rights holders structure “local market” access, streaming windows, and the balance between paid platforms and free broadcast. What to watch next is whether lawmakers move from disputed metrics to concrete reporting requirements or changes to how the NFL must describe game availability to consumers. The “87 percent” fight is likely to be a proxy for a larger question, how to measure reach in a fragmented viewing market.