The anti-American protests are slowly draining the life out of the NFL.
Fans aren’t showing up to the games in the same numbers, and TV ratings are in decline.
And one anthem protester just threw gasoline on the fire with one ridiculous statement.
Since free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick started kneeling for the Star-Spangled Banner, a legion of players followed suit.
The protests divided the country and hurt the NFL’s bottom line.
The low point for the protests probably occurred in London when players knelt for the American national anthem, then stood for “God Save the Queen.”
One of the teams kneeling that day was the Miami Dolphins, and coincidentally another protester from that team is making a big stink.
Defensive end Robert Quinn is upset over the protests.
His beef is that they aren’t getting enough attention.
Quinn told the Miami Herald, “Y’all ignore it. Because when I gave my first message on trying to bring unity, y’all swept it under the rug. It’s not me. When you don’t give a problematic story, y’all just ran away.”
First off, that claim is insane.
The protests have been covered extensively by various outlets, and the participating players have been given major platforms.
The media turned Colin Kaepernick into a star.
Other players like Malcolm Jenkins and Eric Reid — who almost fought each other before a game after their partnership in the players’ coalition deteriorated — have been given ample opportunity to express themselves.
Jenkins, who led the players’ coalition in its securing of $89 million from the owners for activist causes, has been interviewed countless times.
Quinn continued, “You’ve got this lady named Cyntoia Brown, or whatever her name is, and you sent her to life in prison because she was being sex trafficked. But yet you guys dipped.”
The fact Quinn doesn’t even know her name speaks to the biggest problem with the protests: they’re unfocused.
Most of the players don’t even know what they’re protesting and why.
Kaepernick’s initial protest was over the police shooting unarmed black suspects.
But those shootings are statistical anomalies in a country of over 325 million people.
Last year, the number of unarmed black suspects shot by the police was 20.
Twenty people might get shot in a bad weekend in Chicago, but activists seem to have laser focus on the micro-issue of police shootings.
Police shootings should be thoroughly investigated, and several cops who acted criminally have been prosecuted.
When Quinn was a member of the St. Louis Rams, a handful of his teammates engaged in the “hands up, don’t shoot” protest in solidarity with Michael Brown.
But Barack Obama’s Department of Justice found no wrongdoing in the Brown shooting.
The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was a falsehood that persists today, similar to the so-called epidemic of felonious police shootings.
Quinn isn’t even the first protester to complain about the perception of the protests.
Jenkins himself compared the protests to the players wearing pink during breast cancer awareness month, which is asinine.
Encouraging women to get an exam is not the same as joining a movement that paints police officers as racist, bloodthirsty murderers.
If Quinn wants to be taken more seriously, he needs to do a better job of educating himself on the issues and expressing his goals clearly.
