Escapism comes in many forms, and one of America’s favorite ways to get away from the worries and troubles of the world is to watch its favorite sport; football. Sadly, like all things very popular in America, the left found it necessary to co-opt it and use it to push social justice messaging and agendas. As a result, America began tuning out and by 2021 the Super Bowl, one of America’s most anticipated annual events, was attracting the lowest attention it had ever seen.

To say that the NFL had wholly learned its lesson and has completely distanced itself from woke culture would be inaccurate. You can still see endorsements for the most destructive political organization in the nation on the back of some of the player’s helmets and at the end of a few football fields. Activists are still getting messages out on the back of the organization, but for the most part, you don’t see disrespect being thrown at the country through players kneeling on the field during the national anthem.

The NFL certainly doesn’t want to displease the activist left, but it’s now learned a hard lesson about what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to injecting politics into the game. It has slowly backed away from the practices it once embraced during the height of Colin Kaepernick’s influence.

And as it did so, America began to make its way back to it and resulted in a highly viewed Super Bowl.

According to the Daily Wire, the game had well over 100 million viewers, making it the most-watched Super Bowl since 2017 and a massive rebound from the least-watched Super Bowl just last year:

Super Bowl LVI was a smashing success for the league, becoming the most watched show in five years, according to the NFL. The game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams delivered 112.13 million viewers, which includes people tuning in on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock.

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It’s a massive bounce back for the league, who experienced their lowest Super Bowl numbers in 14 years in 2021.

The decline since 2018 had been rapid and steady. The NFL had lost 33 percent of its audience that year due to boycotts spanning various reasons, but the common connection between most of those reasons had something to do with politics. That decline continued and even threatened the 2022 season until the NFL began pulling back on the reins.

This was likely helped by the matchup of the LA Rams and the Cinncinatti Bengals, but one thing can’t be denied and that’s the absence of politics coaxed fans back into watching the games.

This is an important lesson for any brand. Get woke, go broke. It’s been proven time and again. The reason it doesn’t work is simple. Woke politics isn’t the moral movement it bills itself as. It’s an ideology based on victim creation and divisiveness. Embracing it requires complete and total obedience to the messaging of a group that profits and gains power only when it succeeds in generating anger and hatred between groups.

The groups it does not support are naturally pushed away, thus causing mass abandonment from any organization that embraces woke culture. Thus the “get woke, go broke” principle.

The NFL got woke and started losing money in large sums. They learned the “get woke, go broke” principle the hard way, but since leaving it behind they’ve begun to recover their lost audience.

Every brand should be paying attention.