My favorite comment from yesterday's posting about Michael Vick came from Lori, who was so fired up, she sent it twice. Still, she said that if Vick continues to play, she'll never watch the NFL again. (The Tyson line was good, too, especially since at this point, Vick might be able to beat Tyson. Thanks, Lori.)

Some of the comments here have been a little extreme, and you don't have to look far, to other message boards, to see even harsher remarks, many of which go way over the line. But this one gets right to the heart of this situation:

How much, as a fan, are you willing to put up with from this league?

I touched on this a little in my column for tomorrow, but while the NFL's rep is damaged, every other sport had taken a hit in the bank account when a scandal comes along, or when players or anyone else connected with the sport messes up. Baseball brags about its attendance, but its TV ratings for its big events (All-Star Game, World Series) continue to plunge. (That's not even counting the damage from the 1994 strike it clumsily tried to undo.) And we've been over it too many times how bad the NBA has suffered from its reputation as a league of "thugs'' (God, I hate that word now). Ratings are bad for the Finals and attendances has been all over the place.

The NFL, though, never suffers from anything. In fact, it took until players were getting arrested literally every week in the past year before there was anything close to a public backlash. Fans are still unable to kick the habit, no matter how much they say they are offended. For the longest time, they were willing to believe that this wasn't a league issue, it was an individual player issue. Now we know otherwise, and now it's one of the marquee players involved.

Is this the year fans stop buying tickets? Stop going to games? Stop devoting their Sunday afternoons and nights, and Thursdays and Saturdays and whatever days the games are on, to the NFL? Do they dismiss it as something they should spend time, money and emotion on because incidents like this one offend them so much? Or are you willing to give it the benefit of the doubt you don't give the other sports?

The real underlying reason, of course, that Paul Tagliabue got away with ignoring the problem is because it never once affected the bottom line. Attendance was great, ratings were great, big sponsors didn't pull out, merchandise didn't slip - nothing. Fans kept it all afloat, while screaming about the character issues that were driving them away from the NBA and baseball.

Now that the NFL is at the biggest image-related crossroads it's ever been at, what do you do? Will you talk about how disgusted you are, or will you back it up?