"Peyton Manning illustrated last week why football is like anything else in entertainment. He has a future that is essentially unknowable, but storms of speculation swirled around him in a way that was curious because we're not so good in sports at accepting "I don't know" as a correct answer to a question, especially not in the soap-opera-for-males world of sports. This led to Yahoo! reporting that Manning's injury is more dire than expected and ESPN reporting that he had been cleared to play, all of the conflicting information from anonymous sources, noise disguised as news, the media feeding the interest because the interest feeds the media. The truth? Ehhhh, whatever. That's ancillary. All that really matters is the interest — both the kind given by fans and the kind given by banks.

Recession-proof football is bigger than it has ever been, America's addiction so consuming that the Pro Bowl, which was a mountain of fermenting sewage, actually did a bigger TV rating than a World Series game, fake football with no stakes somehow larger than real baseball with all the stakes.

Some numbers to digest: Anheuser-Busch will pay $1?billion to be the official beer of the NFL over the next six years. That's one sponsor, just beer, so you can imagine how much the NFL is raking in with its official wireless provider, credit card, hotel, pizza, bank, tractor, etc. Yes, tractor. Everyone is lining up with fists full of cash just to be attached to this magical thing. During a difficult economic period, the NFL in December also re-upped its TV contracts with giant price hikes. CBS went from paying $625?million for TV rights to $1?billion for AFC games. Fox went from $725?million to $1.1?billion for NFC games. ESPN went from paying $1.1?billion for one game a week to $1.9?billion, and NBC went from $612?million to $950?million. And DirecTV paid $1?billion just to broadcast the games CBS and Fox were already airing. That's pretty impressive double-dipping, getting another billion dollars for something you've already sold to someone else."