Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken are hard at work crunching numbers …

Okay, they’re numbering the number of fish crackers they can chow down per hour.

Anyway, remember all those posts and comments we on the conservative side of things have been pounding out in recent years about how the NFL would be the death of itself via embracing the work following BLM? Yeah, just kidding.

Wednesday’s doubleheader on Netflix set records as the most streamed NFL games in U.S. history, with numbers nearly five times more than the NBA.

The Baltimore Ravens’ 31-2 victory over the Houston Texans averaged 24.3 million, and the Kansas City Chiefs’ 29-10 win at the Pittsburgh Steelers averaged 24.1 million, according to early viewer figures released by Nielsen on Thursday.

Nielsen also said there were 65 million U.S. viewers who tuned in for at least one minute of one of the two games.

While individuals can and do rage, rage against the flying of the pigskin as opposed to the dying of the light, the facts are what they are. The NFL is more popular than even Taylor Swift. One can only imagine what would happen if TayTay had been booked as the halftime entertainment for this season’s Super Bowl instead of Kendrick Lamar, although the latter’s scheduled appearance does make for some interesting musing about what would happen if, for the grand finale, Drake were to make his way to the stage.

Pop culture references aside, a post written earlier this month by my colleague in the professional world and friend in the real world, Bob Hoge, comes to mind. In it, he mused about the NBA’s decline in viewership in recent years. The post is a VIP offering, so I shan’t directly quote from it as you can either read it for yourself or need to play a slightly belated Secret Santa to yourself by gifting a deserving reader — namely, you — a VIP subscription. There’s even a sale going on!

MORE: NBA Ratings in Free Fall: What's to Blame, 'Load Management'—or Something Else?

Certainly, the NFL, with its social justice-drenched slogans in endzones and, at their option, on players’ helmets, can lay claim to playing the woke game with the best of them. Or the worst of them, if you prefer. So how has it survived and thrived while other sports have tanked in the ratings?

However, when comparing to the 2011-2012 seasons, other sports have also seen a drop in cable viewership - due in part to the decline of cable within homes across the United States.

According to Nielsen, both college basketball and football have seen drops in comparison to 12 years ago with 38 and 72 percent decreases respectively. Meanwhile the NHL is reportedly down 19 percent, and MLB 21 percent.

Certainly, the NFL is far better at marketing itself and its star talent than other leagues. You cannot turn on a television without seeing Patrick Mahomes or Travis Kelce in an ad for some product or service. Before them, it was Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady. Peyton and Eli Manning are still delivering the goods well after their playing days have ended. What is the common thread?

Simply put, it’s likeability.

Personal likeability covers a multitude of potentially deadly sins in the public relations game. There is no great resistance to potentially grating social justice-oriented messaging when delivered non-stridently by an affable personality. As Mahomes has proved, it also helps to be good at your day job.

Something the WNBA fails to understand — more on that in an upcoming post — is that the guy or girl next door is far more likely to receive a willing audience than the self-appointed arbiter of all things politically correct. People listen to people they can relate to as people. It has nothing to do with skin color. Mahomes is relatable because he neither freaked nor shrieked when teammate Harrison Butker spoke up in favor of a traditional Christ-based family structure. 

MORE: Winning: Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid Show the Way When Asked About the Harrison Butker Nontroversy

Patrick Mahomes and other NFL leading lights do their job, understandably make full use of their day job skills by using their fame to help pitch assorted wares, and are perfectly content to leave it at that. Even as the NFL should have fallen down the slippery slope of woke, its players have saved it from self-destruction.