When the N.F.L. season began this past September, it appeared as if the sport’s cultural prominence — no other league is anywhere close to as popular or rich — might be in jeopardy. The league was plagued by scandal. The Pittsburgh Steelers, for one, were forced to play their first four games without quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who was disciplined after being accused of sexually assaulting a college student in the bathroom of a bar. The New York Jets, meanwhile, were busy hooting at the television journalist Inés Sainz on the field and in the locker room — a flap that, in hindsight, seems charming relative to the lewd text messages that onetime Jets employees received from former quarterback Brett Favre (reportedly involving a photographed penis) and the supposed foot-fetishism of the Jets’ current head coach, Rex Ryan.

This all occurred after an off-season in which the danger of the game to its players was front-page news. Of course fans had long suspected that high-speed shots to the head probably weren’t healthful — just as most people in the 1950s surmised that smoking probably wasn’t consequence-free — but the detailed reports on brain damage and the attendant Congressional hearings about football’s effect on America’s youth made suspending disbelief impossible. What’s worse, the early weeks of N.F.L. action were a sickening showcase of head-to-head collisions: concussions aplenty. Suddenly, football appeared to be more savage than ever. (Let’s not forget that this season included the celebrated return of Michael Vick, a man once involved in drowning and hanging dogs.)

Image Credit... Source: ESPN.

And yet, here we are. The Steelers and Jets weathered all their off-field problems to remain the last two A.F.C. teams standing. And despite its hard-line concussion stance, the league is contemplating the addition of two more grueling regular-season games to its schedule. The ratings are just too huge for the league not to consider the move, even if it causes players untold extra harm; this was the first year that each football game shown in prime time won its time slot. But here’s the truly shocking part about this N.F.L. season: Among women 18 to 49, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was the third-most-watched program in America, trailing only “Dancing With the Stars” and “Grey’s Anatomy” and beating shows like “Glee.” In fact, according to Nielsen, the number of women watching “Sunday Night Football ” has increased 23 percent over the last two years.