• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, August 12, 2010

It has been suggested that if the Super Bowl ever headed to cable, all hell would break loose in Washington. Congress would pass all sorts of roadblocks, courts would issue injunctions, and the FCC would muscle in. This appears to be one reason why Dick Ebersol found himself meeting with FCC staffers and a Department of Justice attorney Wednesday.

As the Final Four goes to TBS and the Bowl Championship Series to ESPN, it begs the question of whether all premiere sports properties are en route to pay TV? ESPN chief George Bodenheimer stoked the fire recently, saying he "certainly wouldn't rule it out" as far as the Super Bowl coming to his network.

But Ebersol, who heads NBC Universal's sports and Olympics programming, sought to assure regulators that the recent past is not prologue.

With the FCC and Department of Justice reviewing the proposed Comcast-NBCU merger, Ebersol (and others from NBCU) effectively promised that the transaction would not bring the World Series to Comcast's Versus network.

Instead, according to a meeting summary, the NBCU group indicated the merger would bolster NBCU's ability to acquire sports rights and "would not result in the migration of such major sporting events away from broadcast television."

That appeared to include prime Olympic events and marquee NFL games.

At the meeting, Ebersol was joined by Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics -- along with NBCU's general counsel and vice president of regulatory affairs, and two outside attorneys. There were 15 FCC staff members and Natalie Rosenfelt of the Justice Department's antitrust division.

NBCU attorney David Solomon of Wilkinson Barker Knauer filed the meeting summary with the FCC on Thursday.

The document says that NBCU explained in the meeting some of the financial reasons why big-time sports would remain on broadcast TV, or at least the NBC network. It is unclear, however, what reasoning it used, and the document leaves some questions.

It notes that the NBCU group discussed the sports ad marketplace. But the contingent also explained that advertising dollars alone are not enough to "support broadcast coverage of major sporting events."

The need for that dual revenue stream has been cited as the main reason why sports events are going cable. Networks need affiliate payments to spend liberally on rights fees, notably TBS as it gets the Final Four starting in 2016.

On the flip side, the NBCU group could have argued a lucrative second revenue stream has come to broadcast in the form of retrans consent payments to local stations, including the 10 owned by NBCU. Also, NBCU can extract payments from NBC network affiliates to give it more of a war chest.

Even as NBCU made its case in Washington this week, Comcast has already promised high-profile sports events, such as "Sunday Night Football" and the 2012 Olympics, will stay on broadcast TV. That came via an agreement with the NBC affiliate body, which now supports the merger.