The NFL's new anthem policy was not as unanimous as the league wants people to believe

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Friday, 25 May 2018

quote [ When the NFL first announced its controversial new anthem policy, commissioner Roger Goodell claimed in a press conference that it was "unanimously adopted" by the NFL team owners.

However, ESPN reported that the league never took a formal vote on the new policy, and that, "Not taking an official tally is atypical for a major resolution." ]

This is mildly entertaining, as this has been making the rounds as a "unanimous vote by the owners" and it turns out that the NFL is in the midst of some serious backtracking and pulling of their collective feet out of their mouths.

[SFW] [business]	[+3 WTF]
[by knumbknutz@3:43pmGMT]

Comments

damnit said^[1] @ 10:43pm GMT on 25th May [Score:5 Insightful]

This was posted by a guy named Nathan Ryan on Facebook. Long, but a good read and analysis.

Reveal

Nathan Ryan
May 23 at 11:05pm

A few things about football and kneeling.

I read somewhere that the average career of an NFL player is 56 games (3.5 years). The average salary is $500,000. The elite of the elite make much more, but most do not.

If a player is injured, their contract is gone. A cut player loses their money. I'm not sure about health insurance, but I wouldn't put it past the NFL to cut that as well.

College players at major universities earn millions for their college. They are not allowed to sign a jersey and sell it. They are not allowed to earn any money off of their likeness. If they are one of the few who are lucky enough to make it to the NFL they get paid. Most players do not.

People often argue that the athletes get "paid" by a free college education. Many players have lifelong injuries and no health coverage from the university they played for. I got a free college education because Louisiana is very generous with its TOPs scholarship. If my attendance at LSU made the university hundreds of thousands, if not millions, I'd feel like I was being ripped off (and my scholarship did not put me at risk of life altering injuries).

Maybe kneeling isn't about kneeling at all.

Maybe white people feel defensive because they feel uncomfortable when they notice a majority black league where all the owners (where they're even called owners) are white. And maybe we notice that these owners draft and trade black men based entirely on their physical prowess.

Maybe it's important that we are asked to notice that black people are killed by police at alarmingly high rates. Maybe we should notice that white wealth is accumulated at 20 times that of black wealth.

When I was in my early 20s I heard a black NFL player, Warren Sapp, compare the NFL to slavery. I rolled my eyes. "These are millionaires," I told myself. I was very quick to discount this as hyperbole. I'm not saying it is slavery, but it does have hints and echoes of an American system that allowed slavery to exist. All white owners draft majority black athletes based on their physical skills. The athletes are literally stripped down and their bodies are measured at the combine. They have no say where they will go at the start of their career, and can be traded at the discretion of the white owner. They are told how to act, what to say, what they can eat. Now they are told when to stand.

The Mississippi state flag includes a miniature confederate flag (don't google it, it's not worth seeing). This is the blackest state in the country. By law, all Mississippi students are required to say the national and state pledges of allegiance. I'm not sure how that is legal or ethical (and a state pledge, really?!?! But I digress). The blackest school system in our country require its children to stand at attention facing a miniature confederate flag and say "I salute the flag of Mississippi and sovereign state for which it stands with pride in her history..."

This country has a long history of telling black people to honor a country that enslaved their ancestors. If slavery is too far away, it asks them to honor a country that lynched their ancestors. If that is too far away, it asks them to honor a country that segregated them (the whole country, not just the south) not just with schooling, but with housing, safety and wealth.

It asks black people to watch as their country - state by state - finds ways to continue disenfranchising them. It asks black people to watch as this country's police disproportionately kills them, and then see the police not be held accountable.

Non-wealthy white people in this country have been living under the promise that if they behaved themselves they would never be treated as poorly as we treat black people. This was done before the founding of this country. To keep enslaved white and black people from revolting, our country's earliest founders made black people's enslavement hereditary. Every since then, underpaid whites mere existence and safety was predicated on their proving they aren’t black. Reinterpret some of the most racist sounding protestations from white people as "I've seen what has been done to black people. I'm not black. Please don't treat me like you treat black people."

Maybe kneeling is exactly what it’s about. Colin Kaepernick explicitly asked troops what form of protest would be more respectful. He was told that kneeling was considered more respectful than sitting, so he kneeled. Colin Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job. Neither does his teammate who kneeled next to him, Eric Reid (he went to LSU...just saying)

Maybe we’ve been asking black people for generations to sing an anthem white washed of its full meaning (just as this country tries to white wash its history). The third verse includes the line “No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” White enslaver, Francis Scott Key, who had written that blacks were a “distinct and inferior race,” wrote this verse after the defeat of two regiments of black men who, after escaping enslavement, fought for the British in the War of 1812.

Maybe this whole thing is a distraction. It is, after all, just a game. We are living in unprecedented times. The west is still recovering from fires. People in the south are still recovering from floods. Our attorney general has promised to make the LGBT community and immigrants less safe (actually, we could add almost any group of people on the margins that our current administration has threatened, so you can fill in your own heartache and injustice here).

Then again maybe this protest is right at the core of what we’re facing in this country. Since it’s founding we’ve told black people that their voices are irrelevant. We’ve refused to hear their concerns. Our country has told them, just as it has told underpaid whites, immigrants, and its original inhabitants that if they behaved themselves, one day they would find a place at the table.

If a black man says to me that he doesn’t feel comfortable standing for a song that glorifies his ancestors’ enslavement, we need to listen. If a person says that this country is violent towards them and their family, we need to listen.

gma said @ 12:49pm GMT on 26th May [Score:1 Interesting]

The short average career is one of the reasons the players get the shaft on things like guaranteed contracts. These guys have worked their whole lives to get there, and many see that they are never going to be star players, and that their careers could end any day. how do you convince them to strike? They could be giving up a full season's pay, possibly 1/3 of their career earnings, in exchange for what would likely be an incremental benefit from a strike.

In a sport like baseball, players have longer careers, and that gives their union teeth. They can and will strike if they feel they're not being treated fairly. So they have guaranteed contracts, unrestricted free agency, etc.

damnit said @ 5:13pm GMT on 26th May

Or, rather, how to convince them not to strike by showing who owns them, literally.

hellboy said @ 11:37pm GMT on 25th May

That is a must-read and dead-on accurate.

1111 said^[2] @ 1:19am GMT on 26th May [Score:-5 Boring]
filtered comment under your threshold

Taxman said @ 3:56am GMT on 26th May [Score:-2]
filtered comment under your threshold

4321 said^[1] @ 1:31pm GMT on 26th May [Score:-4]
filtered comment under your threshold

Taxman said @ 3:49pm GMT on 26th May [Score:-3]
filtered comment under your threshold

Ankylosaur said @ 3:50pm GMT on 25th May [Score:1 Underrated]

Businesses punishing their employees for not engaging in political speech in the correct manner as proscribed by the monoculture. I'm sure we'll hear from the usual folks decrying this as something something run amok, yes?

C18H27NO3 said @ 10:36pm GMT on 26th May

The argument is that the NFL is a private business, and 'political' protests are not protected. However, the US military spends $6M a year selling militarism and jingoism on flyovers and nation worship. AND the EEOC protects discrimination based on race or creed, and #blacklivesmatter can be considered a creed.

Ankylosaur said @ 11:22pm GMT on 26th May

I was sarcastically referring to the sort of rightwingers who support punishing players who also expressed outrage over Google's "politically correct monoculture" and cause célèbring of James Damore's firing. The only difference between this and that is Kaepernick wasn't kneeling in support of harassing and demeaning his fellow coworkers.

HoZay said @ 6:52pm GMT on 25th May [Score:1 Underrated]

I hope the players association tells them to go fuck themselves.

knumbknutz said @ 6:59pm GMT on 25th May [Score:2 laz0r]

If all the Black NFL players took a knee on opening day and got suspended at once, there wouldn't even be enough players left to field an opening kickoff.

Hugh E. said @ 10:13pm GMT on 25th May

If all the players who opposed racist policing took a knee, it would be even worse. (I'd like to think so.)

hellboy said @ 11:38pm GMT on 25th May

It had fucking better be.

Hugh E. said @ 2:29am GMT on 26th May

I don't know, with almost 63 million votes for the guy who says, "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You just see them thrown in, rough. I said, 'Please don't be too nice,'" You have to wonder how many jackboot lickers are out there.

hellboy said @ 2:49am GMT on 26th May

Sad but true. The inability of people to see beyond their own immediate narrow self-interest is really depressing at times.

ComposerNate said @ 8:36pm GMT on 25th May [Score:1 laz0r]

NFL war promotion

HoZay said @ 9:24pm GMT on 25th May [Score:2]

Distraction from brain damage.

gma said @ 12:14pm GMT on 26th May [Score:1 Interesting]

This may all be by design. Roger Goodell's term as commissioner has shown very clearly that his job is to shield the owners from bad PR and take the public drubbing himself.

The owners probably came to the conclusion that they needed to do something, but whatever they did would piss off some people. So they pass a half-assed rule, then leak that the rule isn't their fault. Now if a particularly liberal fanbase gets upset about the rule being draconian, or a particularly conservative fanbase gets upset about it being too soft, the owner can just say "I agree, and I fought this rule from the start," absolving him of any responsibility.

the circus said @ 11:30pm GMT on 25th May

What's the appropriate way to protest this decision?

hellboy said @ 11:40pm GMT on 25th May [Score:1 Funny]

"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it." - Mitch Hedberg

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