The N.F.L.’s television blackout policy dictates that for a home game to be shown in the team’s market, it must be sold out 72 hours before kickoff. Teams in danger of a suffering such a fate frequently scramble to sell the necessary seats.

For their season finale last month, the Cincinnati Bengals sold out a day before the deadline by giving fans one free ticket for each one they purchased. The Miami Dolphins avoided a blackout in September when the local CBS station, Anheuser-Busch and other sponsors bought tickets.

There were 16 blackouts in 2011, including six Bengals games and five Tampa Bay Buccaneers games.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission took a step that may lead to the elimination of all sports blackouts, of which the N.F.L.’s are the most notable. The commission said it was seeking public comment on eliminating its own rules that have effectively backstopped league policies by prohibiting cable and satellite operators from carrying a game already blacked out by local broadcast stations.

“We’re asking the government to get out of the business of propping up sports blackouts,” said Brian Frederick, executive director of the Sports Fans Coalition, which filed a petition in November to end the F.C.C.’s blackout rule with four other interest groups. “The F.C.C. has had the rule since the 1970s and has never taken a comprehensive look at it.”

The league firmly believes in the policy nearly 40 years after it replaced one that required that all home games be blacked out within a 75-mile radius of the stadium. The language of the rule is clear; it is to ensure a team’s “ability to sell all of its game tickets” and to “make televised games more attractive to viewers through the presence of sellout crowds.”

A league spokesman said that the rule helped keep all of its games on free television.

Before Congress passed legislation that enacted the current policy, President Richard M. Nixon, a staunch fan who no doubt bristled at being unable to see Washington Redskins’ home games in the Oval Office, supported a bill that would have eliminated blackouts altogether.

Over the decades, N.F.L. teams have become more successful in selling out their stadiums. From 1973, when the current rule went into effect, to 1979, half of all home games were blacked out. In the 1980s, that figure dropped to 40 percent. In the 1990s, 31 percent of games were blacked out in the home markets.

From 2001 to ’10, the percentage of home games that were blacked out fell to 8 percent.

Frederick anticipates that the N.F.L. and other leagues will oppose the elimination of the F.C.C.’s rules by saying that blackouts are a financial necessity.

“That’s fine if they want to make the case that they are economically dependent on these blackouts to stay in business, which is not the case,” he said. “Anybody who looks at the sports business knows that their main source of revenue is television, not tickets.”

The interest groups argued in their petition that the F.C.C’s blackout rule “supports antifan, anticonsumer behavior by professional sports leagues.”

They added: “The leagues are at the root of the problem because they currently charge exorbitant prices for tickets, which in turn results in lower attendance. The leagues then punish fans by blacking out games from television because a few seats remain unsold.”