What’s the problem with people gearing away from NFL? I guarantee you that there will always be a crowd for it, but who cares if it’s a slightly smaller crowd? You make it sound like a BAD thing that people may potentially be spending more quality time with their families, making memories, and doing something truly fulfilling or meaningful, rather than watching tv.
If you got that from what I said, I either said it wrong or you understood it wrong. I didn’t mean that at all. I don’t care what people do with their own time, it’s theirs to do with as they please. I was speaking from the perspective of the NFL as a business and the hits their business have been taking as a result of these protests.
I would also like to make clear another thing that I have heard that the players say often, that they feel they can ‘…use their platform to…’. The NFL is not anyone’s individual sound board. The platform belongs to the name on the front of the jersey and the NFL as a whole. The NFL will continue with or without those players. In as much as I cannot make my company look bad in any way shape or form, especially on their time, neither is it ‘their platform’ to make a statement. They signed the agreement, which did include language dealing with the National Anthem where they are to stand with hand on heart, by long standing policy of the NFL. It’s in the collective bargaining agreement they players signed off on. I didn’t know this was the case until recently, but since it is NFL policy, the NFL can, if they choose, punish players and the Player’s Association could not do a damn thing about it.
Now, I can say that dialog, which is the course both player/ owner/ NFL is pursuing, is the best possible way to handle the situation so that everybody has a voice and decide together how best to move forward, so I commend all sides for proceeding to the negotiation table this week.
Big NFL owners/players meeting today.
How dramatic!
Or watching the superior sport: soccer.
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That’s a good thing. My guess is that eventually the NFL will sponsor some sort of ‘Equality’ week or month or something to that effect to assuage the players and the NFL. That we they ‘raise awareness’ and everybody can stand.
I tried, I really did, I just find it incredibly boring, like NASCAR. I get its the most popular sport in the world, just not for me.
The players better. It’s less money they can get.
Finally in the modern ear the athletes are getting a cut of the $$$, and a larger one at that, after decades of them getting the short end for short (relative) money.
To turn around and have that shrink back down, particularly in a sport as damaging to your person as football should be a major concern for the players.
I want these guys to make as much as they can. In fact I want everyone to go out and earn as much as they can. Fans fading away isn’t going to push that number up…
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Yup, the less money the NFL makes the less they can pay players. The only reasons for the extrodinary salaries many of the players make is because of fan participation and viewership. Losing, up to potentially 30% of this revenue will affect the bottom line down to the players. And players causing trouble will be paid less than those who are not. It’s just a fact, the NFL cannot afford to alienate half or more of their fan base.
Whether you agree with them kneeling or not does not change the fact that people are choosing to turn the channel and not go to games. This is affecting business and that is not good.
Maybe it’s good for people to do things other than watch football, but it’s not good for the NFL.
If you were to tell the players “feel free to protest the national anthem, but it will cost you 15% of your salary”, not a single one would kneel or protest. They may not respect the flag, country or anthem, but they damn sure do respect the money they make.
Everybody is loyal to the dollar, the NFL, NFLPA, and the players. When this hits them in the wallet, they will stand like a motherfucker, hand on heart, singing the shit out of every word in the anthem, yelling it from the mountain tops.
Money is king. No amount of inequality will beat out a person’s bottom line.
It’s all fun and games until it hits your pocketbook, then play-time is over.
I’m one of the fans who is absolutely not watching football. The kneeling during the National Anthem was the last straw. Ray Rice punching his fiancé out and only getting a slap on the wrist, then the commissioner lying about it, then the league lecturing me about domestic violence was very disgusting.
Michael Vick getting to play football again after the dog fighting scandal, and hearing his fans dismiss calls for harsher punishment with excuses like “it was only dogs” was disgusting.
The fact that 90% of the league is obviously on performance enhancing drugs but they pretend like they’re clean is a joke.
The league denying the effects of CTE for years is disgusting.
The big deal they made over deflate-gate is embarrassing.
The fact that the pentagon was (still is?) paying the NFL millions to honor our service men and woman. Couldn’t the fucking league honor them for free? Why did they have to get their palms greased?
I was the kind of fan who watched an average of 2 games a week, bought one or two items of merch and went to the stadium once a year, even though it was 4 hours away and ticket prices (and the price of a fucking beer and a hotdog) were well beyond my means. But I don’t need this shit in my life. There’s plenty I could do on a Sunday, when I’m lucky enough to be off.
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America’s short term memory is goldfish level. There’s no way this will continue long enough to bleed into any more than a small number of contract negotiations.
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It depends on how long the on-field protests last. If they continue the losses will too. The longer they continue the more it will stay in the American consciousness. The quicker it fades the faster it will be forgotten.
I have talked to vets, real honest vets and many have boycotted NFL last year. I am not talking about people who just served in the military, but who have fought and killed the enemy where their lives were in danger. One had a patch of the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard he cut off a soldier he had to take out. He cut the patch off the soldier and keeps it in his wallet. Not a cold blooded killer, but a man who suffers everyday because of what he had to do to protect his fellow soldiers in combat.
The very instance of disrespect he shut down and boycotted the NFL the instant of Kaepernick’s protest. He was not amused. He didn’t care to even bother with why, his friends left Iraq draped by the American flag on their coffin.
The bullshit “oppression” the kneels were claiming was a non-starter for him. Those players by in large have no clue, no cintilla of a clue what oppression even actually looks like.
To him and many vets like him don’t give a fuck about trumped up charges of oppression. They saw the real deal and nothing in the U.S. comes remotely close. Compared to many places in the world these vets have a point. We don’t know what real oppression looks like, not even close.
The NFL will have to fight hard to get those vets back. These vets have friends and family who support them, they also turn off out of respect.
Yeah, the average citizen may have a short memory, but not all of them. They don’t give a fuck about pithy gestures. They care about all the folded flags given to too many families. Any perceived knock to the flag is disrespect to their fallen brothers. To many its no different then spitting at Vietnam vets coming home. They band together and rise up with their feet and their wallets, their extended families follow their lead.
The NFL knows this. It’s in their best interest to stop the protests.
Our social issues don’t even hold a candle to the true oppression these folks have seen with their own eyes. There is a contingent who may never come back.
The NFL being the most popular sport is no guarantee. It can fall to the wayside if people turnoff. It’s a risk they cannot afford. This is just a plain fact. Do not grow complacent on popularity, it can be a fringe sport in the blink of an eye. And these players won’t make squat.
Not gonna lie, I have little respect for people that make absolute decisions while intentionally gathering no facts first.
I don’t feel inclined to rebeat the dead horse, but this is where you (them) lost me. Acting like nothing can be considered bad unless nobody has it worse is retardlogic at best. All the people that use it included.
What they’ve seen doesn’t come anywhere NEAR holding a candle to REAL oppression a la N Korea. Those soldiers haven’t seen ANYTHING. (see how stupid the line of logic feels when extended)
To be blunt, the NFL doesn’t have a choice. They’re caught between a rock and a reeeeeeally hard place. Stopping the players now would look like caving to Trump, which they can afford even less.
Nah. Not even close. Every single NFL player could kneel with USSR flags stamped on their shirts and football STILL wouldn’t become a fringe sport.
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At least every country in the world competes to participate in the soccer world cup… I don’t see anyone wanting to join the World Series 
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cough World Baseball Classic cough
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True, but one of the things I love about this country is we don’t really care what the rest of the world thinks. 
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I perhaps misrepresented his position, it is a bit more nuanced than that. He’s no mouth-breather. The guy is actually extremely intelligent, like genius level intelligent and he’s seen shit that would make your hair curl. I am not even sure why he told me all that he did. But somehow for some reason, people feel the need to spill their guts to me. It happens to me frequently, I could be standing in line at a grocery store and some stranger who I exchanged small talk with is suddenly telling me their life story. I guess I have a trusting face. I asked a small question about his time in across his 3 tours in Iraq and I got a whole load more than I bargained for. He also suffers from hellacious PTSD which I am sure plays a role into his rigidity on things. But you should respect his point of view even if you do not agree. I am sharing a snippet of his story anonymously so you know this point of view does indeed exist and it’s not an ignorably small part of the population. Mainly because it spread to immediate and extended family members as well.
The last part of this is more to the point, actions have reactions and while this is more an extreme case it goes to the larger point that this form of protest is technically against league policy that is on the contract the players freely chose to sign and its causing people change the channel.
That is not what I am saying. Sure, people in the U.S. have had and continue to live out a harrowing existence. But these cases on the more extreme side of the bell curve, not the norm for most people.
Further, yes CONTEXT MATTERS. Being pulled over for being black or experiencing some unpleasantness by some people does not compare to having your wife stoned to death for being raped, having a barrel bomb full of chlorine dropped on your house, or being beheaded for speaking your mind, etc. Sure these are extreme conditions, but they do exist and exist in greater numbers than can be legitimately tolerated.
If you want your grievance to be heard, understood and addressed seriously, it requires the proper context. If you are making outrageous claims of abuse when the abuse is actually rather minor comparatively you start to lose the ears of the people.
Here I am going to pick on BLM a little as an example of extreme reaction lacking fact and reason; from the very early days. BLM was founded on a false premise. That this nice young man, Michael Brown, was minding his own business, the police stopped him, he held is hands high in the air and the officer shot him to death for no other reason but that he was black. The town went nuts, protests mostly peaceful some not so much, talking heads applying all kinds of conjecture without the benefit of knowing the facts, charging racism, death threats made against various officials, etc. Then we learn the truth, he stole from a store, assaulted the police officer, tried to grab his gun and as a result of that, he got shot. The facts should have nullified the protests and calmed the city down. Did it? Shit no. Still they march “Hands up, don’t shoot”, something that never happened. At least it didn’t happen to Michael Brown.
Further, the actual data does not show a disproportionate ‘death by cop’ against the black community vs. everyone else. That in no way minimizes the experience other recorded instances like Philando Castile which looked like pure murder to me and it doesn’t mean racism at large does not exist. They do exist and we need to address it and do better, but action needs to be based on fact not emotion. When you see a black man gunned down by a cop, it evokes strong emotion and I understand that. But we cannot act on pure emotion because emotion is often extreme and wrong.
So in other words, yes we have problems in this country and some are serious and need to be rectified, but you also need the context that most people in the U.S. are better off by-in-large than most of the world. Yes, it is that special a place like no other on Earth. I am not saying, ‘since ‘X’ isn’t the worst possible misery a person can suffer so we shouldn’t give it regard’, I am saying look at things in context.
In Kaepernick’s case, he’s walking around with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro shirts and praising a place like Cuba in Miami and he expects someone to give him a job? I hope I do not have remind you or anybody else the amount of murder, misery and mayhem those two people caused in Cuba, against the Cubans. He’s praising a country with a history of horrific oppression while condemning a country that enabled him to become a millionaire by being decent at a game. It’s not the knee that bothers most people, it’s that he is a ticking time bomb of heroic stupidity and it can rear its ugly head at any time taking a team’s concentration from the game to justifying their existence because this nimrod said another stupid thing. Context, it matters, it will always matter.
If he decided to boycott the NFL prior to learning why Kaepernick was kneeling, you represented it as well as you needed to.
If you genuinely believe this is the reason even a small percent of people are upset (I’m talking more than 1%), we’re going to have to agree to disagree.
Has anyone said those 2 things are the same?
I would wager someone said something along these lines to MLK Jr. Not that I’m comparing the civil rights to now, but ANY AND ALL concepts of “think about it comparatively with people that have it worse” are 100% non starters for me. Imo, that’s not even in the ballpark of how it should work.
Actually, it kinda is lol. Or at the very least it’s what bothers the vast majority of people I’ve heard from.