A local grocery chain is holding a raffle today for about 2,000 tickets to Sunday’s Detroit Lions game.

Why? For positive publicity. If the grocery store hadn’t bought the tickets, the local Fox affiliate would not have been able to broadcast the game.

The NFL is kinda funny when it comes to television. Most of you don’t know this, but if your local team doesn’t sell out a game, it can’t be broadcast on local television. Now, the NFL rarely doesn’t sell out a game, but in markets like Detroit and Buffalo, this is a real issue.

I didn’t grow up a huge NFL fan. We lived one mile from the Big House. The Lions weren’t very good, and the NFL wasn’t consistently broadcasting them every Sunday. I enjoyed the NFL, but it wasn’t until I moved away from Detroit after college that I grew to appreciate the product. I consider the NFL the best sports product in the world (sorry, soccer fans, you just don’t know what you’re missing), but I don’t have a favorite team.

This year, we’re back in the Detroit area, and we have to worry about the blackouts again. It’s possible, maybe probable, that Front Office Football wouldn’t even exist if I had never gone out and seen the country, never lived in areas that were passionate about the local NFL team.

I think the blackout rules are antiquated and absurd. Now that Roger Goodell has established that he can stand up to anyone, it’s time to abolish local blackouts.

The NFL is a national sport. It’s marketed as a national sport. People everywhere know Peyton Manning and look forward to watching him play. People will tune in Sunday night to watch Tom Brady and LaDainian Tomlinson. On Monday, the NFL can market Donovan McNabb and Clinton Portis. Ratings are good, no matter what game is broadcast.

Compare that to baseball, a regional product. Baseball used to be a national sport, but horrible mismanagement and greed led to people tuning out unless their local team was involved. The Fox Saturday afternoon games now score ratings below a 3 - less than their NFL pre-game shows on Sunday.

Usually, the NFL encourages this national approach. There are now three or four national games every week, and more people tune in than watch the World Series these days. And during any broadcast, you are constantly reminded of the scores elsewhere - right to the down and yard line this year.

It is a national product. But here we have a television rule invented in another era. A rule that keeps people who might, someday, become fans of this national sport, in the dark.

In Los Angeles, many NFL fans don’t want an NFL expansion team. Why? Because in the past, the second-largest television market in the country couldn’t necessarily watch the big games. If the Raiders were playing on Monday night, and didn’t sell out the game, no Monday football in the entire L.A. area.

A few years ago, former commissioner Paul Tagliabue defended the blackout policy. His evidence? He had to go back to 1950 when Los Angeles attendance declined after a local station televised the games.

If your only evidence that blackouts lead to better game attendance is more than 50 years old, you’re definitely suffering from a logic deficit. Television was more an event in those days. The population was lower. The cost of attending a game wasn’t a week’s pay.

Most successful NFL franchises don’t worry about sellouts day to day, because they make most of their sales in the form of season tickets. They even charge thousands for seat licenses. It’s a different game than it was back in 1950 when one team in a very large market suffered a ratings decline.

As I look over the schedule this season, I’m glad the Lions only play in one solo spot - the Thanksgiving Day game against Green Bay which should sell out easily. But the rule will keep the Lions off the television a few times this season, and that’s a missed opportunity to grab new fans.

How many people in the Detroit area have never identified with the Lions because of this archaic rule? Why turn people off in the areas where your product is the weakest?

I hope Goodell takes a long look at this rule in the near future. Maybe he should visit the area grocery store where unwanted NFL tickets will sit tomorrow in ignominy amongst the Cheerios and Pop Tarts.