It doesn’t take a genius to know there will be rampant kneeling during the national anthem during the upcoming 2020 NFL season given what has transpired over the last month.
The only question now is how will league officials, coaches and general managers, handle their athletes disrespecting the American Flag and our country’s song.
And now there’s a new report that indicates exactly how the NFL will treat any athlete who kneels for the national anthem.
We already know there are riots in the streets while a deadly contagion also runs rampant through them.
America hasn’t seen this kind of nationwide civil unrest since 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and while it may die down soon, we’re about to relive 2016-2017 all over again when Colin Kaepernick led players in kneeling during the national anthem.
It’s about to get immeasurably worse in the NFL and it’s mostly due to New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who at first admitted he would never agree with anthem-kneeling until the sports industry shamed him for it, and consequently reversed his course. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell agreed with Brees’ new position too while adding, “We, the National Football League, believe that Black Lives Matter” instead of All Lives Matter.
President Donald Trump criticized their new position on Twitter by concluding “NO KNEELING.”
Trump wisely sees where this pattern is headed and wrote following Goodell’s public address, “Could it be even remotely possible that in Roger Goodell’s rather interesting statement of peace and reconciliation, he was intimating that it would now be O.K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country & our Flag?”
Guess what. A new report reveals Trump’s suspicions to be dead-on because the NFL plans to allow any player to kneel during our country’s song to escape without punishment.
An NFL source told Front Office Sports, “We anticipate taking the same approach we’ve taken the last number of years. No discipline will be enacted. No player has ever been fined.”
That statement is and isn’t true at the same time. Yes, no player has ever been fined but the NFL had strict plans in place for fines and suspensions against anthem-kneelers but ultimately scrapped those plans after backlash from sports journalists. So this “the same approach we’ve taken the last number of years” is grossly inaccurate.
In the meantime, the NFL just pledged a donation of $20 million to hundreds of organizations fighting “systemic racism” in the United States. That will bring the league’s total donations to $64 million. Last year, the league also formed a partnership with superstar rap mogul Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation for social justice initiatives.
Isn’t this progress why players were kneeling in the first place? This charitable contribution is what they were seeking all along, right?
And to make matters worse, on top of expected mass anthem-kneeling, it looks like disgraced former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, will literally be joining them side-by-side in just a few short months.
The NFL is already optically changing its position on Kaepernick, who accused them of collusion and blackballing him from the league.
Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll recently admitted he wished he’d signed Kaepernick in 2017 when he was a free agent while also adding we all owe him a “tremendous amount” for his divisive tactics.
There’s no question that this will destroy the league’s stadium-attendance and television ratings. The NFL is about to become unrecognizable.
