NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Cincinnati residents will get to see something this weekend they don't often get to see - a home game of their city's football team.

Meanwhile, after a nervous week, Indianapolis football fans were spared a Sunday without their Colts on television by a last-minute purchase of the teams' remaining tickets by a not-for-profit organization that agreed to buy as much $30,000 worth of tickets to guarantee a sellout for the game.

And thus for the third time this season, but only the eighth time in league history, all the games played this weekend will be broadcast in their home markets.

The National Football League's rules require a team's home games to be blacked out in their home market unless they have a sellout 72 hours in advance of the game.

When the rules first started in the early 1970s, they represented an improvement for fans, who in many cases were being blacked out of home games even when there was a sellout. And the rules maybe made sense in an era when about half the games were not sold out and ticket prices were more in reach of the average fan.

Today it's questionable whether the rule is really spurring significant ticket sales. It's arguable that it hurts ticket sales more than it helps by hurting overall fan interest in teams that are already struggling to attract a crowd.

"We know it's a rule and we have to deal with it," said Ray Compton, the Colt's senior vice president of sales and marketing, which extended its streak of televised home games to 27 with the last-minute ticket sale Thursday. "You hate not to televise a game - it's a three-hour commercial for the team."

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So far this season 92 percent of games are being sold out, up from 84 percent last year. The the majority of non-sellouts in recent years have been concentrated with a few teams that traditionally have trouble drawing - Cincinnati, Arizona and Atlanta. The Arizona Cardinals have not had a blackout lifted by sellout since Green Bay came to town in 2000. It has never shown more than a fraction of its home games since moving to the state in 1988.

Still there doesn't seem to be any ground swell to change the rules. Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports who is now an industry consultant, believes the league is better off not showing games with a lot of empty seats.

"It's a better program for the viewers if there's a full house," he said. "A viewer looking at a lot of empty seats says, 'Why am I watching this?'"

Sports consultant Marc Ganis also believes the rule brings in more revenue than it costs, although he does concede it's another handicap for the already weak teams.

"What often winds up happening, the fewer home games you show on TV the less interest there is in a team, which leads to lower ticket sales," he said. "It can become a vicious circle."

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There are also those in the industry who point to the rule as a reason the league hasn't pushed to bring a team back to Los Angeles, the nation's No. 2 television market. Los Angeles teams had trouble selling out in the city unless they were winning, and the blackout therefore hurt television viewership in that key market.

For about two-thirds of the teams in the sport's most popular league, the blackout rules are not an issue - their season ticket sales equal or nearly fill their stadium's capacity.

Most of the rest of the teams have to scramble to meet the sellout requirement. The Colts, who are considering leaving Indianapolis, have about 39,000 season ticket holders and a stadium that holds about 56,000.

This week somewhere between 600 and 1,000 tickets were bought by The Possibility Network, a group formed by colleges and universities that works to promote adult education. Its executive director said that the cost of up to $30,000 will come from its marketing budget. He believes the publicity it gains from saving the game for local television viewers, coupled with the additional advertising opportunities from the team, make that a worthwhile investment.

The city of San Diego has guaranteed sellouts for the Chargers as part of its agreement to keep the team from leaving the city altogether. Jacksonville, Fla.-based Winn-Dixie Inc. agreed before the season to buy between 7,000 and 10,000 tickets a game to guarantee a season's worth of sellouts for the city's Jaguars. It gives most of these tickets to its customers.

"We think it's worth it, based on the goodwill we got out of it," said Joanne Gage, senior director of consumer marketing for the supermarket chain. "And having people in stores (to get free tickets) bumps sales in stores."

Still, this kind of forced sale would seem to work against building support for the league's weaker franchises. In the age of satellite television packages that can help fans follow teams anywhere else in the country, the blackouts can be hurting the ties between a weaker team and its natural fan base.

The NFL blackout rule is a strategy whose time has come and gone -- as useful today as a 200-pound lineman. But don't count on this strategy that punishes fans and weaker teams going away anytime soon.