Column: As NFL’s disgraces continue, fans come back for more

There are a million reasons the NFL needs to clean up its arrogant and callous act.

But there are 22.2 million reasons it will never happen. That is the number of viewers who watched NBC’s “Sunday Night Football� recently at the end of arguably the ugliest week in league history. It was, as usual, the most watched TV show of the week.

There are a million reasons that the likes of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson should be shunned into irrelevance.

But there are 1.4 billion reasons it will never happen. That is the number, in dollars, that is spent annually on the fantasy football leagues where fans own players and make money based on their performance.

We condemn the NFL during the week, yet cuddle with it on the weekend. We click our tongues, then cheer from our lungs. We call for it to change its culture, yet we won’t even change the channel.

With the NFL finally being subjected to public ridicule for allowing too many questionable characters to live happily within its walls, plenty of blame has been appropriately heaped upon plenty of targets. There have been fingers pointed at inept and now-hiding Commissioner Roger Goodell, at backtracking team executive buffoons, and, of course, at the most frightening of the players.

The only group that has escaped scorn in this mess is, ironically, the one group that has made it all possible. It is the fans who were the first ones to the party, creating this NFL monster and nurturing it into the most lucrative sports enterprise in America. It is these same fans who will be the last to leave, adamantly refusing to give up their Sunday afternoon relaxation, their Monday night parties and their weekday fantasy banter for the sake of protesting the personal behavior of some caveman. It is unfair to blame fans for wanting to keep their games separate from reality, but their message is awkwardly clear, particularly to the giant advertisers who hold the league’s future in their pockets. Just because the NFL is our national embarrassment doesn’t mean it still can’t be our national pastime.

“At the end of the day, we’re not as far removed from the days of gladiators as we think we are,� said Paul Swangard, managing director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. “We still like to congregate in the arenas watching grown men beat each other up. And when one gladiator falls to the ground, it’s the next man up.�

Three days after the release of the videotape that showed Baltimore’s Ray Rice punching out then-fiancee Janay Palmer in an elevator — a blow that knocked him out of the league — his Ravens team played a Thursday night game in Baltimore. The game was viewed by more than 20 million viewers, a higher number than the audience of every other major network TV show that night combined. And, oh yeah, some folks showed up wearing Ray Rice number 27 jerseys, including women.

“I absolutely 100% support him. … It had nothing to do with his job. He should not have lost his job,� said female fan Robin Manahan to USA Today.

Three days later, after Minnesota’s Adrian Peterson was indicted on a charge of negligent or reckless injury to a child for allegedly beating his 4-year-old son with a tree branch, his Vikings team played a game in Minnesota. The game was viewed by more than 30% of the local Minneapolis-St. Paul TV market, ranking in the top half of the league. The suspended Peterson was dropped by only 3% of owners in ESPN’s fantasy football league. And, again, lots of folks showed up at the Vikings game wearing Peterson’s number 28 jersey, including one woman who actually spent the day lightly swatting bystanders with a tree branch.

For days now, eyes have rolled at the police blotters bouncing from Rice to Peterson to Carolina’s Greg Hardy to San Francisco’s Ray McDonald to Arizona’s Jonathan Dwyer. Yet we still can’t, and won’t, look away.

The helmets and pads turn players into robots. We’re not cheering for a guy convicted of beating his wife, we’re cheering for a Transformer. The television cameras use the colorful athleticism to turn the games into events. We’re not watching real life, we’re watching a sports Movie of the Week.

“The underpinning of this story line is, fans just want to be fans,’’ said Swangard. “And once they make the decision to be a fan, they don’t want to carry any ethical dilemmas into it.�

If there was any sense that fans were abandoning the NFL, the major advertisers would be following them out the door, which would finally effect real change in the league culture. But that isn’t happening. Although several major sponsors like Anheuser-Busch have issued statements questioning the NFL’s direction, they were just checking off their social responsibility box. The only advertiser to actually flee a team is the Radisson hotel chain, which understandably requested its name be removed from the Vikings banner, if only for now.

These major advertisers aren’t dumb. If they walk away from the NFL, they walk away from millions of consumers. The fans will have to walk away first. Yet even as the NFL’s integrity crumbles around them, they’re not going anywhere.

Twitter: @billplaschke