High school, college and the NFL. That’s the only football Americans care about.
Remember the Canadian Football League also failed in its venture into the United States during the mid-1990s. So the CFL is already on the defunct list that grew by one with the demise of the Association of American Football. The United States Football League and World League of American Football earlier tried and failed to lure fans away from the NFL.
Through the late 1990s, there was a string of indoor leagues, plus the Arena Football League survived in various forms for about 20 years, but even playing tackle football inside a padded hockey rink couldn’t sway the ticket-buying public.
The NFL is king. Its players can be criminals, the owners can be carpetbaggers, the league can tinker with its rules, skirt political causes or get trashed in court. Doesn’t matter. American fans love American football; they love watching high school players develop into college players into pros. And the only pro league, for them, is the NFL.