Protesting players risk alienating audience

NOW that we’ve reached the point of insanity, is there a chance we’ll return from it?

Friday, the Chargers’ OT Russell Okung, in what was published as an open letter to NFL players, encouraged NFL players to continue demonstrating during the national anthem because they’re “the lifeblood of the league.”

That’s beyond wishful thinking; that’s delusional.

The life-sustaining blood of any professional league is its fans; its customers. They pay the bills, the salaries; they buy the beer, the tickets, the PSLs, the TV packages, the licensed merchandise, the parking and whatever NFL advertisers pay the NFL and their partner networks to sell to fans. The fans pay the team owners, the team owners pay the players.

Fans are the indisputable, irreplaceable source of the NFL’s life and blood. And if players continue to disenfranchise them with preposterous statements and conduct, that lifeblood is going to run dry.

Protesting players have made their selective points. They won’t indulge racial injustice — despite quietly indulging decades of untreated, self-targeting racial injustice. And, as if they think they’re alone, they don’t like Donald Trump. Points made. Although Colin Kaepernick is not registered to vote, there’s another election coming.

But now players are attacking the fair-minded senses and sensibilities of their best friends and benefactors — the fans. If these players choose to further encourage them toward diminished or destroyed investment of time, money and regard in the NFL, they’re on the road to success.

And 150 years after 620,000 Americans were killed in a war largely fought to determine the lifeblood of American slavery — among the first Black Lives Matter movements — right-headed people have grown disgusted by the continued and repugnant representation that “Oh, say can you see” are the first words in the Confederate national anthem.