(Think the Ravens game example above is some weird outlier? That same day, the Packers and Bears met in a winner-take-all for the final NFC playoff slot: the victor would reach the postseason, the vanquished go home. Much of the nation got this stellar contest. But Montana, Idaho, southern Illinois and Missouri saw a woofer: Seattle versus St. Louis, an also-ran with a losing record.)

The workaround for terrible games on your local channel is NFL Sunday Ticket, which for about $200 per season allows the viewer to watch whatever NFL tilt he or she prefers.

The first catch: Since its inception in 1994, Sunday Ticket has been available only to customers of DirecTV. The second catch: DirecTV is a great service if you can get it, but millions of American households cannot. Receiving DirecTV requires installing a dish with unobstructed line-of-sight to the sky above Texas, where the company’s satellite hangs. My house is surrounded by lovely greenhouse-gas-absorbing trees, so DirecTV is out of the question. Any dwelling with trees or other buildings on its southern facing can’t capture the DirecTV signal. Most of New York City, the Chicago Loop, and other downtowns are DirecTV-free zones.

(In theory, a location that can’t receive the DirecTV signal can get a waiver to purchase Sunday Ticket over the Web. In my case, DirecTV told me I wasn’t eligible for the waiver—after the company’s installer told me I’d never receive the signal. Anyway consumers should not need to set up Web-to-TV converter systems. Publicly subsidized products like Sunday Ticket should be available via cable.)

AT&T’s bid to acquire DirecTV includes acquisition of the Sunday Ticket exclusive. The Los Angeles Times reports that snapping up Sunday Ticket is a key goal of AT&T's. Professional football is among the most valuable brands on the entertainment landscape. What communications corporation wouldn’t want a monopoly over a major NFL product?

But the Sunday Ticket cartel arrangement assures that only a small share of the American population can enjoy viewer choice on Sunday afternoons. The same voters who are taxed to subsidize the NFL, to the tune around $1 billion annually, are denied a choice about what games to watch.

Adding insult to injury, anyone in Canada and Mexico can sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket, without cable-carrier restrictions. In those nations, telecommunication law forbids sole-carrier contracts. Inside the United States, the NFL’s antitrust waiver allows it to screw consumers with impunity. And screwing consumers with impunity is a prerogative AT&T wants too!

When the NFL made its first deal with DirecTV, satellite-relayed signals were exotic and broadband cable did not exist: Initially, Sunday Ticket was seen as a niche product for technophiles. A ratings calculation was at work as well. Sunday Ticket is an annualized pay-per-view, and pay-channel viewership does not count in Nielsen ratings. If large numbers of viewers switched from NFL games aired on local affiliates to football shown on Sunday Ticket, the NFL’s Nielsen numbers would decline, even if actual viewership was rising.