Gamblers love the NFL. When the NBA referee scandal first broke, I heard an oddsmaker from Las Vegas say in a radio interview that 99 percent of all gambling in the United States is illegal. That means bets are not just being taken in government-licensed emporiums but in offices, elevators, taverns, coffee shops, street corners, churches, taxi cabs, schools, even police stations.

While it’s impossible to answer whether the chicken or the egg came first, it’s clear that football came before gambling on football did, but only by a hair. The two are intertwined in our society, much to the overt consternation and secret delight of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his associates. The NFL doesn’t condone gambling, and indeed is terrified of it on a certain level (see David Stern and Tim Donaghy).

Yet the NFL also understands the symbiotic relationship between the two forces. Because such a wide cross-section of human beings gambles on pro football, it sustains interest in the product and continues to create more. That’s a sure thing.

Fantasy leagues also represent an increasingly potent niche in the NFL sphere. It can be argued that, in a way, fantasy leagues are simply an outgrowth of the popularity of pro football among women: all the geeks who can’t get dates because the women they want are too busy checking out gridiron hunks gather together and bond in the macho pursuit of pretending to own an NFL franchise.

Yet fantasy leagues are everywhere. No self-respecting Web site would be caught dead without some sort of fantasy league contest, content, promotion or tie-in. And actually, since most fantasy leagues require their participants to throw in a sizeable sum of money into a pot before the season begins, it’s an offshoot of gambling — by men who don’t have women.

Notice how all the other major sports are losing market share while the NFL keeps growing? That’s because none of them contain the NFL’s package of standard features and options. And those sports do much more to promote their individual stars; the NFL does whatever it possibly can to downplay its personalities — the recent Peyton Manning/Reggie Bush onslaught notwithstanding — choosing instead to push the sport’s appeal.

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The strangest aspect of them all regarding the NFL’s seductive pull on fans is that the league is a uniquely American phenomenon even though it’s communistic. The NFL has 32 teams. Each club has to adhere to the same salary cap number. All the clubs share revenue equally. No team is allowed to go off on its own entrepreneurial path to make extra dough.

That all runs contrary to the American capitalistic spirit, yet somehow the NFL’s followers have bought in and stayed in.

Perhaps the quality that NFL fans admire more than all the others is success.

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