NFL owners decide to concede the sack
Team owners didn’t get to be billionaires by standing by their employees when their bottom line is at stake
The least surprising development in Donald Trump’s War on Football is that the unfettered support that NFL owners appeared to show for their players in the early days has turned out to be rather more fettered.
This is a league, after all, in which the players are at extraordinary risk of sudden career-ending injury, and at a significant risk of long-term post-career injury, and yet their contracts are not fully guaranteed. Luke Kuechly, the Carolina linebacker, suffered his third concussion in two years on Thursday night, and, at 26 years old, his future has to at least be in some doubt. The Panthers can simply cut him someday and save themselves some or all of the $27.4 million that isn’t guaranteed on the five-year extension that just began this season. Tough luck, son.
This is a league in which players have had to bargain and fight for every incremental safety measure — fewer full-contact practices, a lighter off-season workload — only to see the league turn around and make Thursday Night Football and its insane three-day recovery period after three hours of simulated car accidents a weekly thing. This is a league that has been sued by former players about concussions and about painkiller abuse, and if you take the time to read either of those class-actions you get the picture of teams who treat their athletes as cannon fodder.
Did we really expect that when the NFL’s billionaire owners were stuck with a decision between supporting their players and worrying about their revenues, they would choose the former?
But, after early rebukes from owners of the U.S. president’s “divisive” and “inappropriate” language — references to his “son of a bitch” comments in a speech in Alabama three weeks ago — and implicit approval of the players’ right to kneel during the national anthem, that turned into choreographed displays of non-kneeling unity and, now, some explicit bans on kneeling during the anthem from certain owners. The league itself vows to put the anthem controversy “front and centre” during a meeting of league owners next week, and while it has been careful to clarify that it has not yet adopted Trump’s stand-forthe-anthem-or-sit-for-the-game edict, it is plainly obvious that the NFL would like to convince players to stop kneeling so everyone can get back to cheering them on as they violently hurl their bodies into each other without fear of having the occasion tainted by a brief, silent social protest.
It’s a win for Trump, so far, who took what was originally a protest about racial inequality and police brutality and made it about patriotism. He convinced his supporters that the playing of the national anthem at sporting events was an utterly sombre moment of devotion to one’s country and the military, even though the stadiums are full of people buying beer and nachos and using the toilet while
is sung. Stephen Ross, the owner of the Miami Dolphins and someone who supported players who knelt even last season, when few were doing it, said last week that they had effectively been checkmated by the president.
“(Trump) has changed that whole paradigm of what protest is. I think it’s incumbent upon the players today, because of how the public is looking at it, is to stand and salute the flag,” he told a Miami newspaper.
Leaving aside the problem with that explanation — what the players were doing was right, but Trump says it is something else so now it is not right — what Ross and like-minded owners are essentially saying is that they will concede the president’s point if he gets enough people worked up about it.
published a poll this week that showed Trump voters had suddenly developed negative views about the NFL, right when the president started complaining about players and the reluctance of the league to punish them. The results were so striking that it suggests that if Trump decides tomorrow that he’s going to tweet angrily about Coke, the smart move is to load up on Pepsi stock.
But if the owners and the NFL believe that all will be solved if they can just get players to stop making their statements during the now-hallowed anthem, I would bet many athletes will not see this as the end of it. What if someone takes a knee after sacking the quarterback? Or raises a fist after scoring a touchdown? After all, Trump has said the problem is players disrespecting the flag, not their right to protest. Would he still blast them if they showed defiance in some other way? (Spoiler: Yes.)
Trump undoubtedly has the owners and the commissioner playing defence, and yet there have to be many players who are not anxious to concede defeat. It’s not just that they have received support from those who encourage them to speak out about things like inequality, but they are aware of the guy at the centre of the controversy, too. In that Alabama speech, when Trump wasn’t suggesting that players who kneeled should be fired, he was lamenting that referees were “ruining the game” with penalty flags for big hits. “Hey, look, that’s what they want to do, they want to hit, OK?” Trump said. “They want to hit.”
It’s a remarkable position to take: Just let them kill each other, already.