The idea that if premium regular season games are not on free-to-air television, the sport suffers is something out of the 1980s, when you got a live match of a Saturday afternoon on the ABC and an evening one-hour packaged highlights of one Sunday match on Seven.

The entire reason pay television pays so much money for rights is that it wants situations like this Saturday when Melbourne face Cronulla for the minor premiership on Fox Sports. It is trying to sell subscriptions, it wants people to feel like they are missing out and to put their hands in their pockets.

Rugby league has taken that money. It has given seven million dollars per club of it to the players. The game lives, day to day, on that money. It can't then whinge that a company that paid for good games has somehow got a good game.

If you have faith in your product, you treat all games equally during the regular season and whatever broadcasters get is the luck of the draw. In this case, they got a choice an chose badly - regardless of how long ago it was.

Allowing broadcasters to pick and choose damages the integrity of the draw in ways we have already gone over – Brisbane being on every Friday night because Channel Nine is playing up to the Queensland market being the most obvious.

It also hurts clubs commercially, Nine shunning the Canberra Raiders no matter how well they play being the stand-out there. On one hand you have a governing body that is mandated to treat all clubs equally, bending over and changing its draw at the behest of a media organisation that doesn't even pretend to do so.

The deeper problem is this: rugby league's sponsors and broadcast partners are trying to flog things to the rugby league's current customers. Like all sports, the NRL needs new customers.

If you're slapping an ad on a V8, you're not going to advertise hedge funds and lear jets. If the people running the V8s want to reach the "big end of town", they are not going to do it with the help of the those who are advertising on their cars or show the races on TV.

Rugby league is just a V8 car to sponsors and telecasters, a giant billboard with which they can flog their product or ads. They don't care that the billboard might want to further itself in competition with other billboards. They just buy space. To progress, the NRL has to push back against this self-perpetuating co-dependency.

In two years time, TV companies won't have the choice of which road the billboard is displayed on. They'll take what they get. The NRL will control its own draw.

Big events, like Origin and the finals, will be on free-to-air for the foreseeable future but in order for the regular season to be fair, every game must be equal in terms of scheduling. Broadcasters have been corrupting the season for too long.

Bungling and embarrassment? Bring it on.

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