In wake of Roger Goodell’s admissions, signs pointing to more player protests at NFL games
It appears NFL games this fall may look America’s city streets do right now.
The league is not going to stand in the way of what increasingly looks like is going to be more players kneeling, sitting, not being there or otherwise protesting during the national anthems before games this NFL season.
A “top league source” told Front Office Sports in a story published Monday players “won’t be fined or disciplined for demonstrating for racial justice this season.”
“We anticipate taking the same approach we’ve taken the last number of years,” the source told Front Office Sports. “No discipline will be enacted. No player has ever been fined.”
This comes three days after commissioner Roger Goodell said in a video distributed on the league’s channels the NFL was wrong to ignore the protest movement started four years ago by Colin Kaepernick of kneeling during the national anthems to raise awareness for racial justice and police reform.
“We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest,” Goodell stated in his and the league’s most direct language yet on social injustice and police brutality.
“We, the National Football League, believe Black Lives Matter.”
Goodell spoke up and out a day after prominent NFL players including Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl-winning quarterback Patrick Mahomes demanded the commissioner do so.
Players are already taking Goodell up on him swinging the door open to protest with promises to do so this coming season. That includes Washington’s Adrian Peterson, the seven-time All-Pro running back and 2012 NFL most valuable player.
Kaepernick began taking a knee in 2016. Then-49ers teammate Eric Reid and others soon joined him. A national controversy grew as other players such as then-Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane that year and eventually Michael Bennett the next joined Kaepernick’s protest and cause. White billionaire team owners dug in. The protesting players’ caused got co-opted into a debate about kneeling during the anthem allegedly disrespecting the national flag and military. Saints quarterback Drew Brees reignited that debate last week. President Donald Trump called a player who doesn’t stand for the anthem a “son of a bitch” who should be fired.
The Seahawks voted the day after Trump said that, in September 2017, to stay inside their locker room, every player, during the anthem for a game at Tennessee.
By May 2018 NFL team owners instituted a rule for the national anthem: all players and team personnel on the field during it must stand. Owners threatened players to stand for the anthem or, in the case of the Dallas Cowboys, lose employment.
The league never consulted its players’ union before announcing that policy. Before the 2018 season ever started the NFL and the union agreed to ignore the policy and not punish players for protesting. Players such as Reid continued to kneel during anthems. But the league never came out in support of the cause.
Last year, Seahawks Duane Brown, Quinton Jefferson and Branden Jackson continued doing what they did in 2018: staying in the locker room area during anthems, then coming onto the field to join their teammates for games after the anthem ended.
Then George Floyd was killed after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into the 46-year-old black man’s neck for more than 8 minutes on Memorial Day.
The furor nationally over Floyd’s death has included peaceful protests across the country and in most major cities..
Athletes from all sports have spoken out on injustice and inequality. Seahawks’ All-Pro Bobby Wagner spoke forcefully last week on the need for whites to listen, learn and understand what it is to be black in America.
Russell Wilson, the face and voice of the franchise, was as impassioned and direct as he’s ever been discussing how the country must change.
Wilson said he saw hope in the way his white teammates—70 of the 90 Seahawks on the offseason roster are black—have responded in team meetings about race and have shown the willingness to learn and help.
Goodell and the NFL have obviously heard this. How could they not?
They sense the tide is changing in the country since Floyd’s death and subsequent outrage. They see more whites than ever may be listening to blacks’ causes and realizing the oppression and the inequality must end.
Money, of course, is likely a motivator here. It always is. Goodell and the NFL want to be on the right side of this wave of change across the U.S., though the Washington Post reporting most owners were “taken by surprise” by Goodell’s video Friday is telling.
Whatever the motivation, the fact remains: the conditions in the league, in rhetoric and theory, are moving toward the NFL accepting players’ rights to protest. Toward their causes being heard.
This story was originally published June 8, 2020 at 11:55 AM.
