It’s week 15 of the NFL season and your beloved Green Bay Packers are about to battle the Washington Redskins.  The Packers are in a heated division race that is coming down to the wire and this road game is crucial.  You’ve spent all morning preparing for the game.  The drinks are cold, the snacks are prepped and your family is all dressed up in their favorite green and gold gear.  Suddenly, you look at the clock and realize it is 11:55 am.  You race to the TV to turn on your local FOX station and as it comes back from commercial, you see the Minnesota Vikings running from the tunnel at US Bank Stadium and the purple-clad fans screaming in joy to watch their team take on the Chicago Bears. 

At this point, you grab your remote control and quickly flip the station to CBS in hopes that the Packers game, in an NFC matchup, is for some reason being carried on CBS.  As your television arrives there, you see Phil Simms rambling about Tom Brady’s matchup against the Miami Dolphins defense while the camera pans over Gillette Stadium.  At this point, panic sets in.  You subscribe to cable so there are no alternate stations that the Packers game would come on.  Questions begin to surface in your mind and you realize that you will not be able to watch your Packers in a pivotal December game.  Now you scramble to think about other options.  Do you pack up the family to head to Joe’s Bar in town to see if he has the game on?  Or, do you just tune into the Packers Radio Network and listen to Wayne and Larry?  While certainly not a bad option, you really wanted to watch the game and now, unfortunately, you can’t.

While many Packers fans in the state of Wisconsin haven’t had to live the dreaded reality above, some certainly have.  Having been through it myself when living in a border county in a Twin Cities television market, I can say firsthand that it really stunk.  And while this may be the first time you realize that this may be a new reality moving forward when the Packers and the local market team play at the same time on the same scheduled network, you slowly learn that you need to make alternative plans to watch the Packers play in the future when this happens again.

Recently, United States Senator Tammy Baldwin introduced the “Go Pack Go” bill that would require cable and satellite providers to give Wisconsin customers access to programming for the Packers games when they would normally be considered out of the market for the game.  How it sits now, there are 13 counties in the state of Wisconsin that are in media markets that sit outside of the state of Wisconsin.  12 of those counties fall into Minnesota markets and one falls into a Michigan market.  In those counties, when the Packers play at the same time as the home market team on the same network, Packers fans are forced to watch the home market team or make alternative plans for watching the game.  The total population that could be impacted in these counties is over 400,000 people.

Keeping politics and allegiances to a party aside, the bill just makes plain sense for Packers fans that live in the border states that are considered part of an outside market.  Similar bills have been introduced in the past by both parties, but they have fallen through without gaining much traction.  Hopefully, it is now time to make this right for fans in these counties.

Packers fans that live outside of the state of Wisconsin, and there sure are plenty of you out there, have to make other arrangements to watch their team play each and every weekend when they’re not nationally televised.  Packers’ themed bars and restaurants are all over the globe to watch games at and the NFL Sunday ticket is always an option, albeit an expensive one.  But for fans that live within the border of the state, taking these measures when other fans in the state do not have to is just plain ridiculous and this bill could potentially make a lot of Packers fans happy.

The toughest aspect about passing this bill comes down to logistics with the cable and satellite providers and how they could potentially broadcast the games based on where a household is located.  Particularly for customers that receive a digital signal via an antenna from their local station, border residents only have the option of picking up a signal from the nearest station.  For these residents, the closest signal comes from the Twin Cities, MN, Duluth, MN or Marquette, MI.  The “providing access to programming” in the bill may mean that networks in these border markets will be required to air a separate channel with both games.

Logistics aside, there just has to be a way to make this right for fans that live in the border counties in the markets that fall outside of the state.  Of course, many Vikings and Lions fans call these counties home as well but their numbers don’t compare to the total number of Packers fans in the same area.  I’ll remain hopeful that my fellow Packers fans will be able to watch their beloved team in the future without any extra time, effort or money spent.  Besides, we want to leave that to the Vikings fans anyway.