The National Football League is enacting a new rule in this coming season that will require players and league personnel on the sideline to stand for the National Anthem, but gives them the option to remain in the locker room if they don’t want to stand. “Individual clubs will have the power to set their own policies to ensure the anthem is being respected during any on-field action. If a player chooses to protest on the sideline, the NFL will fine the team. The player also could be fined by his team.”
In September, more than 200 players knelt or sat during the anthem after President Trump called the kneeling players “sons of bitches” in an Alabama speech. By week 17 of last season, fewer than 20 players knelt, raised fists, remained in the locker room, or demonstrated in some other form.
It’s easy to imagine this new policy backfiring on the league. The NFL Players Association is already complaining that the new policy contradicts past statements by the owners about “the principles, values, and patriotism of our league.” It is likely that at least some of the players who knelt or demonstrated last year will be eager to test the will of the owners this year, and players may not particularly care if their team gets fined. (If teams announce an intention to fine players who kneel or protest, the multimillionaire players may feel paying the fine is worth it to prove the point.)
Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league “talked to tens if not hundreds of players about this over the last year or so to get their input, to understand their position.” What’s never quite been articulated is what the kneeling players would have to see to end their protest. A country where every cop wears a body camera? Federal civil-rights prosecutions, as seen in South Carolina? More police training?
(As I wrote last year, because police officers are human beings and human beings make mistakes, we will probably never have a country or a world where there are no fatal police shootings of unarmed individuals. We can try to minimize them. The intermittent coverage of this issue, and focus on particularly dramatic cases, can easily create the impression that this is a constant and worsening problem. But the number of fatal shootings of unarmed individuals nationwide in the first six months of 2017 was actually almost half the total in 2015.)
What’s indisputable is that for a certain, very vocal segment of football fans, the decision to kneel during the anthem represented an intolerable insult against the country and the flag. In the minds of these fans, the de facto blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick — the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started the protest — represented an appropriate consequence.
Through most of the 2017 season, the controversy gradually quieted down, with the number of players choosing to protest shrinking each week. Now it’s likely to start up again when the players take the field for the regular season in September.
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