The last off-season was a dismal advertisement for the NFL, with dozens of its players arrested, most sensationally the former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, who faces at least one charge of first-degree murder.
Once the season was under way, a bullying scandal, involving the locker-room persecution of a Miami Dolphins player by a team-mate, made the most lurid off-field headlines.
Then there's the concussions controversy. Football remains dangerous. Helmets and other forms of protection have improved but the players are bigger and faster than even 30 years ago.
The hits are harder, and injuries are constant, masked only by the macho ethos that only wimps don't play through them. The most pernicious after-effects, however, are less immediately visible.
Currently, there are roughly two cases of serious concussion every three games. The NFL paid its first real attention to the issue in 1994, setting up a committee to study Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.
In 2002, the neuropathologist Bennet Omalu first diagnosed the degenerative brain disease CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in a former player. And not just any player.
Mike Webster was a hall-of-famer for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a four-time Super Bowl winner regarded as one of the greatest offensive linemen in history. He died, broken, demented and semi-destitute at the age of 50.
Webster became a tragic symbol of a controversy that has only grown. Eventually 4500 former players joined a class action lawsuit against the NFL, alleging the league had knowingly concealed the game's risks from the players. Last August, the sides reached an out-of-court settlement in which the league agreed to pay US$765 million ($946m) but with no admission of guilt.
The sum sounds vast but, spread as it is over several decades, is a pittance compared with the NFL's current annual revenue of US$9.5 billion. Three weeks ago, the judge who is handling the case refused to approve the settlement, arguing it might not be enough.
Most devastating of all, arguably, was last year's television documentary League of Denial, setting out how the NFL would not face up to the scourge eroding it from within. In it, Omalu recounted the pressure he came under from league officials to retract his findings, even as more evidence came to light followed by a string of player suicides, widely attributed to the batterings they took in games.
"Bennet, do you know the implications of what you're doing?" Omalu was asked by one league doctor, he told the programme. "If 10 per cent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport," the doctor went on, "that is the end of football."
Given the evidence of brain trauma in college - even high school - football the chances already are that one in 10 mothers does view it that way; not to mention one famous father.
"I would not let my son play pro football," Barack Obama said in a recent interview with The New Yorker. But his next words start to explain why, despite everything, the game flourishes so mightily. "These guys, they know what they're doing, they know what they're buying into, it's no longer a secret."
In a country that venerates its armed forces as no other, football can be seen as a clash between two armies. Indeed, it has been described by a wit as the perfect metaphor for national life: long periods of confabulation and standing around, punctuated by bursts of extreme violence.
If the league one day does rot, it will be from the bottom up, when America's mothers do say enough, when schools and colleges drop the sport, and America's best athletes choose baseball, basketball ... or even that other sport that the rest of the world calls football.
That, however, is a distant vision, if indeed it is a realistic vision at all.
- The Independent
