‘Play it safe’ mindset dominates NFL
Politically outspoken Kaepernick still jobless because GMs afraid to risk upsetting fans
Sometimes in the column-writing business you pen something that gets an unexpectedly strong reaction.
Last fall, with the NFL suffering through sagging television ratings for its marquee games, I wrote that the chief reason for that was simple: many of those games weren’t interesting. In passing, I was skeptical of the idea that former NFL watchers had stopped tuning into games because of the national anthem protests of Colin Kaepernick (and others who followed his lead.) Many readers responded, often in ALL CAPS to denote ANGER, that I was wrong about Kaepernick and they refused to watch football because of him. This still strikes me as unlikely. But the reaction was a teachable moment for me: there are a lot of dudes out there who do not like Kaepernick one bit, entirely for political reasons.
And, as now seems plainly obvious, some of those dudes work in NFL front offices.
It’s been a week since the former 49ers quarterback’s off-season in the wilderness looked like it might come to end, after Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll mused they were considering Kaepernick as a backup.
That all made sense, since Kaepernick is a mobile type like Seattle starter Russell Wilson, but it has yet to lead to anything concrete. The Seahawks also make sense as a destination because Carroll is one of a small number of NFL coaches who has the security to make mistakes.
NFL people aren’t just conservative in the political sense, they’re very conservative in the risk-taking sense. This is a league in which a large majority of coaches would rather punt the ball from the opposition’s 45-yard line than take a chance on fourth down.
It’s one of the great incongruities of the NFL, the billion-dollar powerhouse populated by leaders who would rather do the safe thing that won’t expose them to ridicule than take a risk. And so they punt, or in this case, stick with some random journeyman quarterback — Case Keenum, Kellen Clemens, Matt Cassel, Blaine Gabbert — instead of a player who was very effective last season, throwing 16 touchdowns against four interceptions for an awful San Francisco team.
Kaepernick, at the very least, would offer a potential upgrade at the game’s key position for a bushel of teams. But it would rankle some fans, and it would get the GM who signed him attention, especially if it ends up going poorly.
The safe move is to pass on Kaepernick. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the safe route the NFL has so far collectively chosen.
nnn The Nashville Predators seem like a lot of fun, and the story of a southern football town falling in love with hockey has got a lot of mileage this spring. NBC Sports has trumpeted that local television ratings have been the highest ever for their hockey broadcasts and on Monday a piece in The New York Times wrote that the Preds “reign supreme in a market that was long the impenetrable domain of football and NASCAR.”
About that supremacy, though. Games 2 through 5 of the West final between Nashville and Anaheim had local ratings of between 10.7 and 13.3, with one point equalling about 10,000 households. In September, a football game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Virginia Tech Hokies earned a local rating of 22.9, which was notable because it edged the Tennessee Titans opener the following day, which pulled a 21.8 rating.
The Predators are, to be sure, drawing record local ratings, but that’s what tends to happen when a team makes it further in the playoffs than it ever had before.
nnn England’s top soccer league finished its season on the weekend, which had all the usual storylines: Chelsea’s return to the top of the table, Liverpool qualifying for the Champions League at the expense of Arsenal, which will miss Europe’s top-flight tournament for the first time in two decades.
Also, Leicester City, the defending champions, finished 12th. This would have been a fairly unremarkable fact on its own in any season before the last one for Leicester, since it was always a team that hung around the bottom rungs of the Premier League, if it hung around at all. And then it won the whole thing last year.
This year’s precipitous drop merely confirms what we knew when it was happening: Leicester’s win was on a very short list of most improbable sports victories of all time.