When Concussion – a movie designed to do for the NFL what the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's Report did for smoking – made its debut over Christmas, it was greeted with a great deal of media hype and no real-people follow-through.
It finished seventh at the U.S. box office that opening weekend – a couple of spots behind Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. Despite featuring a star as bankable as Will Smith, it won't earn back its modest $35-million (U.S.) budget in theatres.
This preachy entertainment was an attempt to change the way football is framed in the great American debate. The non-football-aligned media did yeoman's work banging a funeral gong for the sport. Little wonder – this story has the advantage of being both lurid and morally upright. The NFL was being cast in the same corporate mould as Marlboro or General Dynamics.
Americans didn't buck against the idea. They simply refused to engage it. At one point, they'd make a great show of mourning a Junior Seau, then guiltily tune back in the next Sunday. A great deal of tortured stuff was written and broadcast about that disconnect. It isn't any more.
Even the league's critics have become tired of pretending to care. You can't cry wolf if the people you're crying it to have invited the wolf to stay over for the weekend.
America's encapsulated current reaction to the head-injury crisis boils down to "Football kills people. We get it. Now, when's the football on?"
For the fifth consecutive year, NBC Sunday Night Football was the highest-rated prime-time show on U.S. television in 2015. Its viewership has increased in each of those years. What's No. 2? Thursday Night Football.
Given its rate of growth, Nielsen will eventually be tracking all the people who don't watch the NFL. There'll be fewer of them to count.
Twenty-two million Americans watch football on Sunday evenings – whether it's a glamour encounter or a couple of underperforming schlubs. These ratings are functionally impervious to matchups. On average, 14 million watched the World Series. Twenty million tuned into the NBA championship series. Six-and-a-half million watched the Stanley Cup final.
The NFL is becoming the entertainment equivalent of gasoline or electricity – its demand is inelastic.
The gap is so large between what the NFL is each week and what every other sport is at its once-a-year, very best, it's no longer a competition. The NFL is a media death star. Its only global comparison point is England's Premier League. Uniquely, it manages this while being overwhelmingly popular in only one country.
By just about any measure aside from money earned and eyeballs attracted, this was a down year for the league. It's been battered from all sides by unflattering portrayals of its practices, participants and general standards. Its biggest stars are either in decline or disrepute. Most of its glamour teams stumbled. From an on-field perspective, the biggest story of the year was the emergence of the Carolina Panthers (yawning) and the Arizona Cardinals (yawninger).
You get the impression there was an unspoken leaguewide agreement that nobody should do anything particularly interesting. It was a campaign without stories, even the basest sort.
When Peyton Manning was dinged up in a tasty PED scandal right at the close of regular-season business, no one (aside from Manning himself) bothered to get exercised about it. Everyone had already booked off for the holidays, plus no one wants to risk shaking down the early leader in the 2024 presidential cycle.
Yet, in a year without any special or unexpected reason to watch, more and more people watched.
It's possible that football may be eaten from below, as an increasing number of parents refuse to allow their children to participate in the game. But they've proved they are in no danger from the top down. For as long as average Americans want their bloodlust squeezed into something saccharine and digestible, the NFL will be there to turn the crank and pump out the edible filler.
Having caught a barrage of public-relations bullets in its teeth, fired all the coaches who need firing, shed the lightweights and turned Kansas City against Houston into a game we'll watch despite ourselves, the league can begin spreading out again.
The playoffs begin Saturday. For a solid month, nothing else will be talked about on terrestrial television. If Donald Trump wants air time, he'll have to start Foghorn Leghorning it in the parking lot of Gillette Stadium. Otherwise, no one will care.
The league's existential crisis is receding into the distance. It can once again begin congratulating itself on bringing America together in uncomplicated communal bliss. Everything else that's happening in the country is proof these people can't agree on anything – except football.
That's why they can't afford to let it go.
Cathal Kelly