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It was quite the subtext for a season in the NFL last year.
The star quarterback sent to jail for dog torture, the marquee team accused and convicted of spying on opponents and the player with a video-game moniker finding new ways to test the limits of acceptable conduct in a game with more than its share of bad actors.
And then, in the desert on the Sunday night in the first week of February when the schedule drew to a glorious close, all anyone was talking about was the undefeated season that wasn't, the ridiculous Hail Mary pass caught against a helmet and a new sports star in the city that never sleeps.
Yes, it would appear the NFL is bullet-proof, scandal-proof, animal-rights-proof, you name it. All of those other commissioners, who still must deal with earthly concerns such as dirty referees and diminished television ratings must look on in envy at the exalted position of Roger Goodell.
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As the new NFL year begins in earnest this weekend, Pacman Jones is back, Michael Vick is not, Bill Belichick is still playing the evil genius and the commish appears to have a cakewalk ahead of him compared with 2007. So far, aside from a few of the usual off-field incidents (including one potentially fatal shooting), the sky is clear as clear can be.
Looming just beyond the horizon may be the possibility of a labour dispute, though it is still hard to know what effect the death of union head Gene Upshaw might have on that dynamic. And having done his best to whip players into shape, at least sartorially, Goodell is now trying to enforce a fan code of conduct, an interesting concept, given the normal commercial dictate that the customer is always right, but also an acknowledgment that for all of those hymns to the joys of tailgating, NFL stadiums aren't always places where you'd want to bring your spouse, or your kids or yourself.
Otherwise, the biggest off-field NFL story is the one that's taking place in Toronto, where, come December, the Buffalo Bills will play the beginning of a series of regular-season home games on foreign soil, the first team since the Green Bay Packers (who used to split their schedule in Milwaukee) to have a foot in two markets.
In Canada, the NFL incursion has naturally been the subject of much discussion, nationalist rhetoric, threats of protectionist politics and, behind the scenes, an attempt by the CFL to broker some kind of developmental league deal with the NFL that might ensure its survival. Those talks went nowhere (the NFL club owners being disinclined to spend money on that which they now get for free), leaving Mark Cohon and company to quietly play to their strengths — history, tradition, very good television ratings and a product much improved over recent seasons — and hope for the best.
The fact is, in their wildest dreams they couldn't have imagined Ted Rogers and his partners making as much of a hash of the Bills' summer exhibition game in Toronto as they did. From Rogers's chuckling over ticket prices at the introductory news conference to the desperate efforts to paper the house before kickoff, it was an absolute marketing disaster from start to finish.
But a league able to brush off far greater public-relations challenges isn't going to let the bumbling of a few foreign entrepreneurs get in the way of its grand plan — if the grand plan is indeed what's required down the road, when Ralph Wilson has gone to his great reward, the Bills are in play and the biggest market in North America other than Los Angeles without an NFL team is still the home of willing buyers. Here, there are still people who will tell you why it won't happen, why it can't happen. There, those in the know talk about a team coming to Toronto as the next thing to an inevitability.
That doesn't mean that resistance is futile.
It just means that it's best to understand exactly what the anti-NFL forces here are dealing with. That would be a league used to doing things the way it wants, a business that isn't overly sentimental, an organization that appears to be almost impervious to criticism and a game that gets away with just about anything because apparently it is needed so badly.
