It’s one thing for fans and media members to excoriate the NFL over its handling of recent player conduct fiascos like the Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson and Greg Hardy assault cases, but until we stop watching and talking about football (and we, collectively, have not), it’s likely our moral laments will fall on deaf ears. The league is like that Johnny Manziel photo: What’s that??? I can’t hear you over all the money I’m making…

But evoking the ire of big-time sponsors, the corporate heavyweights who write the league checks to the tune of $1.07 billion a year, is a different story entirely. If you really want to impact change in a business, as the saying goes, hit them where it counts: the pocketbook.

This week, the Radisson hotel chain became the first sponsor to back off its relationship with the Minnesota Vikings, at least temporarily, amid child abuse allegations against star running back Peterson. Nike pulled Peterson’s jerseys from stores in the Minneapolis area and Mylan ended its relationship with him.

On the national level, PepsiCo, McDonald’s and VISA, among others, issued statements of concern about the conduct issues plaguing the league. Anheuser-Busch, which has a $1.2 billion contract with the league, said it was concerned by recent incidents and “not yet satisfied” with the NFL’s handling of them.

With all the PR posturing and moral-high-ground-taking, are any of these national sponsors actually serious about pulling out of a business partnership as wide-reaching as this one? What would it take for a high-profile national sponsor to end its association with the NFL?

“It would take the NFL not doing enough [to address sponsors concerns about domestic violence] and a sponsor being really committed to their own core values,” says Jonathan Bernstein of Bernstein Crisis Management. “I don’t think that combination is likely to happen.”

Perhaps an even bigger reason it’s not likely to happen is there’s nowhere else for sponsors to go to reach an audience as big as the NFL’s. In a media landscape of increasingly fragmented viewership, there’s simply no other product that can guarantee tens of millions of viewers week in and week out.

The scandals rocking the league, while causing a PR nightmare, haven’t yet had any adverse impact on viewership. In the second week of the season, the Thursday night game between the scandal-rocked Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers drew a 13.7 live plus same day household rating rating and 20.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research, the most-watched and highest-rated in Thursday Night Football history. While sponsors might be quick to pay lip service to those enraged by player conduct, they’re don’t seem as eager to pull out of a property that’s putting their products in front of that many eyeballs.

“No doubt the NFL is the top league or sports property in North America,” says Robert Tuchman, president of sports entertainment company Goviva and sports business expert, in an email. “If this were happening in any other sports property, you would already have seen sponsors opting out.”

Still, if sponsors wanted to, a number of media experts believe they could pull out now without much contractual difficulty. Almost all major sponsorship deals come with a morality clause that gives licensees an opt-out if the league falls into scandal or disrepute. Thursday, ESPN reported that Anheuser-Busch has such a clause, but would need to prove that they had lost money because of the scandal in order to pull out.

A criticism that’s been leveled at the NFL in recent weeks is that the league has been far to reactive to crises, too often leading from behind, if at all. It took a second videotape for embattled Commissioner Roger Goodell to re-punish Rice, when almost everyone believed his initial punishment was woefully insufficient. It took a spate of terrible PR for the league to hire a panel of female domestic violence experts.

Bernstein believes the convening of the domestic violence panel was a positive first-step, reactive though it may have been.

“You can’t put the cat back in the bag,” says Bernstein. “The goal is to move from reactive to proactive as quickly as possible.”

He also believes the recent issues plaguing the NFL have put other leagues on alert.

“Incidentally, this has sent a warning shot to every other professional league,” Bernstein says. “The player scandals are sending everybody scrambling to [find out] ‘where are we vulnerable?’ Any team not currently making sure their own house is in order and doing a no-holds-barred examination is just cruising for a crisis.”

Image courtesy of NFL.com.

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