© Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Hey, NFL. Way to go. What are you going to do for an encore, gargle peanut butter?
Sorry. Had to resort to the 4th grade playground insult.
Just when *nobody* was clamoring for a policy from the league on how to handle the national anthem before a game, the NFL cooked up a strict you-must-stand edict that has only re-opened the wounds we all thought were beginning to heal.
Or, as Al Pacino put it in the only memorable moment of The Godfather Part III:
In the interest of fairness, let’s look at this from the owners’ point of view. They are businessmen. They looked at their business. They saw that ratings for marquee events like Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football have declined three consecutive years. They saw that, according to Ad Age, NFL ratings declined overall by nine percent in 2017.
So, from their perspective, they needed to tend to their bottom line. As another line in a far better The Godfather movie went:
No, the NFL owners are not Communists.
We here in the Bay Area approached Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest of social injustice mostly differently than the rest of the country, which recoiled in anger of what they saw as a diss to the memory of George Washington and apple pies everywhere.
So, the owners acted to try to make customers more happy and tune into more games.
Problem is, their timing was atrocious. Absolutely nobody was talking about the anthem. Kaepernick has been effectively blackballed from the league for it, so that issue is on nobody’s front burner. Malcolm Jenkins of the Eagles, who led a group that forced the NFL to shell tens of millions towards social justice causes, stopped kneeling, and there was little indication that any movement of players would do so in 2018.
But now, the players have been backed into a corner. They’ve been challenged, told to behave. The players union has reacted with anger to the edict. And lest you forget — without the players, there’s no football, sports fans.
Instead of working behind the scenes to make sure owners heard all the concerns of players; instead of emphasizing the positive nature of the social work being done by teams and players alike; instead of moving forward . . . the league is moving backwards.
And, the owners have emboldened President Trump to start shooting off his mouth again, saying any player that doesn’t stand for the anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”
Reasonable take, POTUS. Where’d you finish in your law school class?
Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin has called the Prez “an idiot, pure and simple.” And Warriors coach Steve Kerr, on the day of a huge Western Conference Finals game, joined in, calling the league’s policy “idiotic.”
We’re back into the muck and the mire.
Thanks, NFL. Smooth move.