More on Cowboys/Packers.

One of the biggest games of the year in the NFL takes place this week. But most fans will be shut out of viewing it.

When the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers, both 10-1, square off this Thursday night, the game will air on the NFL Network. At the start of this season, Packers/Cowboys looked like a decent match-up of two marquee franchises, but certainly not the biggest game of the season in the NFC. With the game becoming the third titanic match-up of the season (joining Patriots/Cowboys in October and Patriots/Colts earlier this month), the NFL Network has lucked into a game that will be assuredly the highest rated in the network’s history. This comes at the expense of NFL ratings and NFL fans.

Because the NFL Network has such limited distribution (35 million households currently), ratings will obviously suffer. Last year, eight regular season games on the NFL Network averaged a 1.9 national rating and a 5.4 cable rating. The highest rated game was Cowboys/Falcons in mid-December of ’06, which drew a 2.6 national rating, and a 7.4 cable rating^. While Cowboys/Packers should do a far better number, there is no doubt a game that could have easily drawn a 17 rating on FOX or NBC will now be hard pressed to draw a 4.

To put it another way, in order to match the 20.1 national rating and 23 million households that tuned into Patriots/Colts on November 4, Cowboys/Packers would have to draw a 65.7 cable area rating.

A low rating will obviously be the product of low viewership — though in this case, it will not be a case of lack of interest in the game. The NFL Network continues to be in conflict with cable operators over its lack of placement on basic cable. At the heart of the conflict is the NFL’s desire to charge cable operators 70 cents a month per cable subscriber — a relatively exorbitant amount that is meant to make up for the lack of a rights fee the NFL receives from its in-house network.

If the NFL could sell its network to cable companies across the country, including Comcast and Time Warner’s 38 million subscribers, the rate would generate more than $300 million in subscription fees annually. That would be before a single second of commercial time was sold.

Cable operators have refused, leading to an impasse that leaves most NFL fans unable to watch two of the most famous franchises in the entire league playing in one of the biggest games of the season.

^ The coverage area (cable) rating measures the amount of households watching out of the amount of households with access to the network. In this case, 7.4% of the 35 million households with access to the NFL Network watched Cowboys/Falcons. That translates into 2.6% of the television households in the U.S.