NFL needs more than street cred with Roc Nation deal
MIAMI – With Jennifer Lopez and Shakira headlining the LIV stage, the NFL’s Super Bowl halftime show is back to A-list business … a year after Rihanna and other top artists boycotted the league for the wrongs done to blackballed quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
This seems like the easy part for what the NFL banked on in striking a deal last summer with Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter. His Roc Nation company restored a measure of credibility with the Super Bowl LIV music – enriched by a thoughtful female empowerment theme that is heavy on diversity.
Yes, the NFL needed Jay-Z, the first billionaire hip-hop mogul, more than he needed them (as he once rapped), given all of the points lost in Black America over Kaepernick.
Yet as impressive as the musical lineup will be for the Hard Rock Stadium crowd and probably 100 million-plus viewers, the most significant signs of the partnership with Roc Nation have come – and will come – under the umbrella of the “Inspire Change” initiative the league rolled out in January 2019 to raise awareness and support social justice efforts.
Roc Nation was consulted but didn’t play an active role in the powerful Players Coalition ad, produced by 72andSunny, that ran during the AFC and NFC title games and is pegged for airing during Super Bowl LIV, which re-enacted the fatal shooting of Corey Jones in 2015 by a plainclothes police officer in Florida while waiting for roadside assistance. Jones was the cousin of former NFL receiver Anquan Boldin, who ultimately co-founded the Players Coalition with Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins in the wake of the tragedy.
The NFL taking on police shootings? Even with the stated desires to foster understanding, it seems so hypocritical when Kaepernick – who led the 49ers to its last Super Bowl appearance before LIV – hasn’t been able to land another NFL job after taking a knee to ignite the movement that was largely an affront to police shootings of unarmed African Americans.
Two weeks before LIV, Roc Nation and the NFL pushed out a riveting PSA in the digital universe that humanized Botham Jean, the 26-year-old man slain by a Dallas police officer (in uniform, off-duty) in his apartment, where he was said to have been watching football.
I’m told that Roger Goodell cried when he first watched the PSA, narrated by Jean’s mother, father and sister – who also engaged in an emotional meeting with the NFL commissioner, as have family members of other victims of police shootings. The video concluded with an image of The Shield, the NFL’s logo. That’s tacitly stunning.
In 2017, when the NFL’s waning protest situation was reignited by Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the crisis led to the league engaging with the Players Coalition on social justice initiatives, Goodell in his news conference comments and in a written statement didn’t even use the term “police brutality” – which was at the root of the Kaepernick-ignited movement.
Instead, he awkwardly danced about “underlying issues” without naming the institution, law enforcement, that historically has had an egregious lack of accountability and culpability when it comes to misdeeds against people of color.
Yet Goodell – with his share of blemishes over the years in handling crises – is now the key figure needed to push the NFL’s social campaigns forward. That’s hardly automatic, given the politics and big business demands of working for NFL team owners, some of whom seemingly have limited inspiration to address social issues.
He’s seemingly cut out for the task. Whether the NFL owners that employ him will be similarly invested – amid a climate by the way, that includes the dearth of hiring minorities as head coaches, GMs and in other leadership positions – could be another story.
The PSA on Jean was the third installment in a series, “The Responsibility Program,” that Roc Nation was involved with.
For the NFL to step into such waters represents a huge shift in approach, inviting more controversy on one hand and skepticism on the other hand. The league’s alliance with Roc Nation looks a lot like an attempt to buy street cred at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Of course, much will be revealed with time in addressing these issues that in the big picture are vastly more important than premium entertainment.
And this much we know: The proactive efforts by the NFL in engaging with Roc Nation and other entities are vastly better than no action at all.