By Carlin Whitehouse

Statistically speaking, you probably are. The NFL is an absolute juggernaut in the entertainment industry, drawing 200 million unique TV viewers each regular season and averaging 20,000 more fans per game than any other professional league on the planet. This doesn’t even account for the playoffs and Super Bowl. Even though it masquerades as a 501c(6) non-profit entity, “The Shield” and its member franchises hauled more than 9 billion dollars in 2013. On a global scale, that puts it somewhere between the GDP’s of Laos and Macedonia. The NFL got game.

Bros and grannies alike find themselves lining up for the 24/7/365 feast of combine, draft, injury updates, preseason, regular season, post season, off-season, and back again. But fans rarely question why we keep going back for more helpings. Rather than whetting appetites, the mounting list of despicable behavior like hazing, extortion, racism, cover-ups, and violence should be making consumers sick.

Right before the start of last year’s season, the NFL’s lawyers addressed the long, dark shadow that had been gathering over the sport: the long-term consequences of workplace head injuries. A total of 4,500 plaintiffs, former players and family members, joined in a class-action lawsuit that sought, not only compensation for severe brain trauma and illnesses, but to provide “discovery” for all the research and findings that the NFL had conducted. Long story short, the league got to sweep it all under the rug for the bargain “per-team cost” of a second-string linebacker’s salary. No more litigation, and no discovery – the case and the records were sealed – just in time for a triumphant kick-off to the 2013 season. Is anyone able to see the disturbing irony that with all the recent ice bucket challenges, the NFL has chosen to leave so many of their current and future players who suffer from ALS out in the cold?

The National Football League has also become complicit in proliferating a racial slur that has been condemned by 85 or more Native American organizations and tribal governments – including our neighbors, the Penobscot Nation. Say what the surveys will about “average Americans” not caring if the Washington football team changes their name. Here are Chief Kirk Francis’ own words about what the Washington owner calls a term rooted in “tradition” and “pride”: “In 1755 the Penobscot started living under the Spencer Phipps proclamation, this… called for all ‘settlers’ to hunt Penobscot men, women and children… and be paid a handsome bounty when the scalps were brought in for payment. These scalps were referred to as ‘redskins’ when tallying up the bounty. For the Penobscot the use of this word continues to remind our people of this gruesome genocidal act under formal policy. Hundreds of Penobscot were killed during this period of time. This term is all but eradicated in the State of Maine in recognition of this appalling history.” Enough said.

We’ve seen an ongoing pattern of embarrassing episodes in the NFL: one after another drug arrests of players and owners, Richie Incognito’s bullying academy, the Vikings’ hostile and homophobic workplace, and Michael Sam’s relegation to a Dallas practice squad due to fears concerning the potential “distraction” of his sexuality. But, the real elephant in the stadium has to be the league’s negligence in cases of sexual and physical violence against women.

As we all know by now, Baltimore running back Ray Rice beat his fiancé, Janay, unconscious. The crime was followed (many months later) by a Ravens press conference where Rice apologized to everybody but his victim and now-wife. Janay read a script that expressed her “deep regret” to fans everywhere for her “role in that night” – the one in which a 200 lb. professional athlete threw his fist in her face. And no one in the NFL head office so much as blinked. Soon after the anemic “disciplining” of Rice, and the cacophonous public outcry, Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote an almost repentant letter as he rolled out a domestic violence policy that imposes harsh penalties for even first-time offenders. In one public relations move, he tried to make the entire world forget about the decades-long history of restraining orders, assaults and rapes… and his league’s repeated shrugs. Where was a new NFL policy in 2012, when Kansas City Chief (and former UMaine phenom) Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend, Kassandra Perkins, then shot himself in front of his head coach? That should have been a powerful wakeup call, but regularly scheduled games went off without a hitch that Sunday and nothing changed. The NFL has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to the treatment of women and it shouldn’t take video evidence and millions of petitioners to inspire them to do something – at least something more than throw a coat of pink on some gloves and cleats.

Goodell speaks ad nauseam about the “higher standard” at which his league operates, but the growing body of evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of its fans – the very same ones who buy tickets and merchandise, and make the TV contracts lucrative – that words aren’t enough. Americans can continue to blissfully enjoy the National Football League’s thrilling product, but no longer can we pretend we don’t know the true cost. Consumers can coerce the NFL by any means necessary to use their great power to assume greater responsibility – or we can become complicit in their negligence.