NFL Week 15 wrap-up
Armour on Reid testing; plus power rankings
The numbers don’t add up.
The NFL’s drug testing program is supposed to be independent and random, players selected by some complicated computer algorithm only the folks at NASA can decipher. Yet Eric Reid’s name just happened to be drawn again after Monday night’s game against the Saints.
For those who haven’t been keeping track, and Reid most assuredly is, this is seven times he’s been tested since signing with the Panthers on Sept. 27. Two of those tests would have been part of Reid’s physical before joining the Panthers. But the others have all been part of the “random” testing program, which selects 10 players each week from a team.
Eleven games, five drug tests. I wasn’t a math major, but those odds sure seem fishy. Especially when the person getting tested is suing the NFL for collusion and is, after Colin Kaepernick, the player most identified with the protests during the national anthem over racism and economic discrimination.
But, yeah, totally random. “That has to be statistically impossible,” Reid said after the game. “I’m not a mathematician, but there’s no way that’s right.”
The NFL said it could not comment on an individual player and instead pointed to details of the joint agreement with the NFLPA on the drug testing program.
Public attitudes toward Kaepernick and the player protests are already shifting — cue that Nike commercial! — and there will come a day when Kaepernick will be viewed as a seminal figure in U.S. race relations. Yet most NFL owners remain entrenched in their privileged bubbles and seem set on making Kaepernick and Reid pay for their audacity.
Kaepernick doesn’t have a job, the absurdity of which is more apparent with every week. How’s that “different direction” Washington took working out for you, Jay Gruden? Reid, a Pro Bowler who averaged two interceptions per year in his first five seasons, languished on the free agent market until almost a month into the season.
While Reid is playing again, signed by one of the few NFL owners who has a clue, he’s reminded at every turn that he’s not really welcome.
“I know I’ve done nothing wrong, so I’m not concerned that my drug tests will come back (positive),” Reid said last month. “But the system is lying, much like what I’m protesting.”
This is where the NFLPA comes in. The league’s drug testing program is jointly administered by the NFL and the NFLPA, yet the NFLPA has been conspicuous in its silence about Reid. It supposedly looked into the possibility last month that Reid was being targeted, according to ESPN.com, but has yet to offer any kind of public support. Or, if Reid is wrong, defense of the testing process.
Which shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The NFLPA, which didn’t reply to a request for comment from USA TODAY, hasn’t exactly had the players’ backs in the protests.
When Kaepernick began protesting, the union’s only “statement” was an interview executive director DeMaurice Smith did with The Nation’s Dave Zirin in which he offered lukewarm support. Not until President Donald Trump called players “SOBs” and suggested they should be fired did the union get more forceful in its defense of protesting players.
By that point, it was too late. The protests had been branded as “anthem protests” rather than protests during the anthem — there’s a big difference in those semantics — and the players painted as spoiled and ungrateful, throwing a middle finger at the flag and the military.
Had the NFLPA actually come to the players’ defense from the start, helped amplify the injustices the players were trying to highlight, the message and the reaction to the protests likely would have been different.
Instead, the players were left to twist in the wind.
Being on the right side of history doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a choice. You be the judge of where the NFL and NFLPA fall.