• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 6, 2011

What warrants a 64% price increase in this economy? Gas for your car? Your health care premium, perhaps? Try something much more healing, especially to men: football.

That's the eye-popping price tag estimate that's probably landing on the doorstep of the NFL’s national TV network partners -- CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN.  It will push total annual NFL costs for the networks to over $7 billion.

The NFL might argue that now-- and over the longer term of any new contract -- its TV programs offer consistency against a still fractionalizing media world.

The more important focus has been the NFL's key target audience: men, and young men specifically. For decades, that audience have been hard to come by for many networks.

While trends have come and gone, one constant has been the quality and size of male audiences that keep watching NFL games -- including, of course, the most viewed annual TV show year in and year out, the Super Bowl. No doubt, we may be saying many of the same things for decades to come.

TV advertisers who target men were nervous earlier this year -- when it dawned on many of them that the NFL might not have a season in 2011 due to labor and owner issues. Then it was the NBA's turn.

While the NBA -- with many more games and a longer season -- was somewhat of a lesser concern,  the NFL posed a more urgent TV marketing dilemma, due to its limited number of games, shorter season, and thus more precious supply of TV ratings. All that made many TV executives nervous, even the selling executives who seemingly had the most to gain.

To the relatively less-educated, a $64,000 question might come up: Gave the NFL's ratings gone up 64%? Nope. 

The bottom line is that someone will need to pay for this price hike. Increasingly, that might be levied on advertisers who will willingly pay the freight -- much like they continue to do with overall broadcast  programming. 

But with the NFL Network and DirecTV's "Sunday Ticket" complete package of out-of-market games, perhaps things will shift. Perhaps male viewers may be asked to pay more themselves in extra cable, satellite or mobile device fees.

Let the consumer tackling begin. That will create a healing feeling for some.