Why the NFL doesn't change

America is extraordinarily tolerant of the NFL. “Pro football, it seems, can do anything but drive us away,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal in August. He described moves the NFL has made that would ruin another business: undercut your partners, maintain a nonprofit status while paying huge executive salaries, accept unnecessary public subsidies, stay out of Los Angeles so your teams can use the prospect of moving there as leverage to keep demanding those subsidies.

And this: alienate women, who make up 45 percent of the NFL’s viewership.

Rosenthal wrote this at an early stage of the controversy surrounding the league’s handling of Ray Rice, the star running back for the 2013 Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. Rice was suspended for two games for dragging his unconscious fiancée Janay Palmer (now his wife) out of a hotel elevator, as documented by a security camera. It struck a whole lot of people as a mild punishment for the crime. And one needn’t have been a cynic to imagine more to the story.