Owners to focus on anthem protests at NFL meeting
ATLANTA — The NFL approved a new owner for the Carolina Panthers, passed a rule to eject players who hit with their helmets and took steps to spice up the kickoff.
Still to be resolved: a much more contentious issue.
What to do, if anything, about players who kneel during the national anthem?
“We recognize with our visibility and the interest itself that it’s taken a life of its own,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. “We ask the world, ‘Don’t turn your head. Look at us. Wait a minute. Look at the NFL. Look at everything we’re doing.’ And then when we have some issues we’ve got to work through, we realize we’ve asked you to look.
“Let’s do as good as we can do.”
At their annual spring meet-
ing on Tuesday in Atlanta, league owners welcomed David Tepper to their ranks by signing off on his record $2.2 billion deal to purchase the Panthers from disgraced team founder Jerry Richardson.
During a brief news conference in which he took only a handful of questions, Tepper immediately made a bit of news by seeming to imply he would be willing to listen to offers for a new stadium from other cities in North and South Carolina. The team has made no secret of its desire to replace 22-year-old Bank of America Stadium, and its lease runs only through the upcoming season.
“What’s the name of the team? Carolina Panthers. It’s going to be the Carolina Panthers,” Tepper said. “And that means this team has to have some kind of presence in the Carolinas and last time I saw, how many are there? That’s right, there’s two of them.”
But Tepper, a hedge fund owner who is worth a reported $11 billion, also reiterated several times that the largest city in the Carolinas is the “logical place for this team.”
As a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tepper was already familiar to the league’s owners and his approval was a mere formality. The vote was unanimous.
Anthem protests are a much thornier issue, one that has reached all the way to the White House — and will talk more about the matter when they wrap up their meetings today.
Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016, a quiet but powerful protest against police brutality and racial inequities in the justice system. Other players took up the cause, and the gesture carried on during the 2017 season even after Kaepernick left the 49ers and failed to land a job with another team.
President Trump turned the anthem protests into a campaign issue, saying the NFL should fire any player who takes a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The NFL hasn’t gone that far, but Kaepernick has yet to land another job and one of his former teammates and fellow protesters, safety Eric Reid, is also out of work.
Both have filed collusion grievances against the NFL.
The new kickoff rules are aimed at making the high-speed play a bit safer and perhaps more exciting. Players on the kickoff team can’t get a running start, while eight of the return team’s 11 players must start out in a 15-yard zone near midfield, forcing them to run down the field alongside the coverage players. That will make the play more like a punt and should improve safety.
Wedge blocks — two blockers teaming up on the same player — will also be banned. In addition, any kick that hits the ground in the end zone will be an automatic touchback.
The new rules will be re-evaluated in 2019 to determine their effectiveness, but the league doesn’t want to eliminate kickoffs altogether.
In another attempt to improve safety, any player who initiates contact with his helmet is subject to ejection after an in-game video review that will be decided in New York.
“This is about eliminating unnecessary use of the helmet,” Al Riveron, the league’s head of officiating, said.