League’s empire can’t be stopped

The NFL is akin to a runaway freight train. It’s the iron horse of pro sports: You cannot stop it; you can only hope to contain it. Look at the numbers from last season. If you thought pro football fans would turn away from the most recent Super Bowl in the wake of one off-the-field crime after another last season, you have to think again. The Super Bowl on Feb. 1, 2015, garnered an average audience of 114.4 million viewers. That’s the largest recorded U.S. television audience of all time.

The previous largest audience? The Super Bowl on Feb. 2, 2014, with 112.2 million viewers.

Moral to the story: If you want a megaaudience, just wait for every first Sunday in February. While Major League Baseball is America’s pastime, the empire that is the NFL looms as America’s passion.

The weekly Las Vegas betting lines help fuel that passion, for sure.

And what about the all-important advertisers for NBC’s Super telecast? Key corporate sponsors, from McDonald’s to the crucial beer empires, such as Budweiser, ponied up $4.5 million per 30-second commercial. That dollar figure, of course, also is a record.

Note this statistical bonanza for the NFL and NBC was tallied after The Elevator Punch seen around the pro football world and beyond. Former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocked out his then-fiancee Janay Palmer in an elevator in Atlantic City, N.J., on Feb. 15, 2014, that ultimately became the most infamous video probably in U.S. history; the video was released by TMZ to the public on Sept. 8, 2014.

Cringeworthy events — from domesticviolence confrontations to drug suspensions to dogfighting crimes to off-the-field player murder cases to child-abuse issues to deflated footballs to a fool named Cris Carter and his “fall guys” — dogged the NFL all of the 2014 season and the offseason.

However, the end result showed the NFL is still protected with an immovable coating of Teflon. During the Reagan