Nov. 15, 2008; San Diego, CA, USA; Utah Utes fans sits in a nearly empty Qualcomm Stadium prior to the game against the San Diego State Aztecs. Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-US PRESSWIRE

It is pretty darn expensive to make it out to the games with a family. The Tickets are going to be $50, the parking $20, the beers $100 (depending on how thirsty you are), and the food to try and keep you from getting a hangover ($70). That is a pretty heavy price to pay to get out to the football games!

Watching games from the television on HD has been getting better and better also. Combine all that up and you have less people buying tickets to go out to Qualcomm stadium to watch football games.

For the last couple of seasons, Chargers fans have had to hope that we would sell enough tickets to lift the blackout, so that we could watch games on our television. We would have a “blackout watch” throughout the week to see see how many tickets were sold. If we didn’t sell enough tickets, some would actually buy tickets to the game OR others would put on some crappy internet feed that they found.

Now the NFL looks like they are softening their stance on the blackout rule:

Team owners have passed a resolution that starting this season will allow for local broadcasts of NFL games even when as few as 85% of tickets are sold. Under the new rule, each team has more flexibility to establish its own seat-sales benchmark as long as it is 85% or higher. To discourage teams from setting easy benchmarks, teams will be forced to share more of the revenue when they exceed it. – Wall Street Journal via Deadspin

Looks like it just got a little bit easier for us to be able to sit at home naked and watch the game from our comfy couch with beer in hand. We could also cook up some of those awesome Football Food Friday dishes that Cindi keeps putting out there!

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Next week’s game against the 49ers still has 3000 tickets available and needs to sell them out before Monday. A win on Sunday would bring more people back onto the bandwagon and should sell those tickets.