NFL controversy about more than a flag
On the surface, the National Football League looks to have defused the emotional and costly controversy over players kneeling for the national anthem before every game.
In a clever PR move, the league ruled last week that all players on the field must stand respectfully for the national anthem. However, not all players must be on the field for the national anthem. Those multimillionaires who want to protest the inequalities of American society for free can stay in the locker room until kickoff.
Let’s get serious. What are the chances that this minority of unhappy players will forsake the opportunity for national publicity by sitting obscurely in a smelly locker room instead of making their “statement” by publicly kneeling in front of thousands of fans? About the same as the Cleveland Browns winning the next Super Bowl.
The controversy, which began almost two years ago when benched 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem, is a disturbing one. It plays off a mere game, but it’s serious business, costing the league, teams, advertisers, television networks, parking lots and sports bars countless millions of dollars in lost revenues, lost viewers and considerable goodwill even among disaffected non-fans.
The league has already suffered black eyes from offthe-field thuggery of some players and its tardy attention to the devastating bodily damages, especially to the head.
But more importantly, the controversy reveals profound fissures within American society. These are primarily between urban Eastern sophisticates and the great unwashed masses of flyover country, most of whom can no longer afford to take their family to even one football fiesta per season.
These are people who increasingly have felt ignored and patronized by any powers that be, especially those in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. They sense an erosion of traditional values, norms, even manners under the pressures of a changing economy, bitterly divisive and permissive politics, immigrants who resist assimilation and seem to threaten jobs, among other causes.
And all this seems perversely supported by a smothering media. These worried Americans turn on the TV and get lectured by actors and late-night hosts touting their alien coastal values, causes and over-thetop revulsion for the man elected president. They go to watch the NFL for fun and the first thing is a political protest that interrupts what’s supposed to be entertainment and that insults patriotic values once virtually unanimously held.
So intentionally provocative are the protests that professed claims of free speech rights get lost in the two-way anger. Compromise is a bad word, and not just in Congress.
Millions of football viewers didn’t compromise, either. They sent a message last fall. Overall NFL TV ratings were down 9 percent. And social media was ripe with former fans expressing surprise how little they missed the games.
Paradoxically, of the 17 Republican presidential candidates in 2016 and the initial four Democrats, only the Ivy League-educated New Yorker with billions of dollars and an ego to match detected that voter angst. He didn’t create the anger. He rode it. So, he won and the losers still can’t accept that because that would mean accepting they were wrong. It’s his fault.
Thus, it was predictable last fall when the unpredictable Donald Trump, himself once a pro-football team owner, denounced kneelers for disrespecting the flag and owners for not firing them.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell touted, accurately, many players’ deep community involvements. And he added last week, “It was unfortunate that on-field protests created a false perception among many that thousands of NFL players were unpatriotic. This is not and was never the case.”
The league’s resulting response was craftily designed to appear to address free speech concerns by allowing self-selected players to avoid the national anthem and honoring the U.S. flag. But it dumped responsibility for enforcement on the 32 teams. The league will fine the organizations, not offending players who fail to comply.
Team owners agreed on the new policy but several said they’d simply pay the fines without disciplining players, essentially a stay-out-of-jail invitation to disobey the compromise. In other words, our way is the only way.