Has fans' love affair with the NFL begun to wilt?

HOUSTON — It may have been a blip, explained as much by the must-watch presidential debates as by some wholesale turn away from football. Or, decades from now, 2016 could be remembered as the season fans started falling out of love with the NFL.

TV ratings declined 8 percent, with the presidential election partly, but not solely, to blame. Many of the league’s highest-profile contests were boring blowouts, including eight of the 10 playoff games leading to Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Patriots and Falcons.

Two NFL teams abandoned fan bases in St. Louis and San Diego in favor of their original home, Los Angeles, where neither team had played for decades. And the Raiders are considering leaving Oakland for Las Vegas , which, for all its renown as America’s gambling capital, has never supported its own big-league team.

A key segment of fantasy football, as big a driver of NFL growth as anything in recent years, saw its massive numbers plateau. According to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, entry fees for daily fantasy games increased by 4 percent in 2016, compared to 222 percent the year before, as several states explored the legality of what some perceive as gambling.

All this was piled on top of ongoing narratives about concussions and their effect on players, a domestic-violence problem that hasn’t abated, Colin Kaepernick’s national-anthem protests and the leadership of a commissioner, Roger Goodell, who is often portrayed as heavy-handed and clueless on some of the league’s most pressing problems. Exhibit A: “Deflategate,” which led to the four-game suspension of arguably the league’s best-known player, Tom Brady.

Brady will close the season going for his fifth Super Bowl ring in a game that will draw high ratings thanks to the decades-long hold the NFL has held over American sports fans. That the infatuation will last indefinitely, however, may no longer be a given. Baseball, boxing and horse racing once consumed the American public, but they don’t anymore.

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