On Wednesday that NFL announced that they had come up with a solution to their Kaepernick dilemma: They announced that players could stay in the locker room for the national anthem if they wanted to, but if they came onto the field for the “Star Spangled Banner,” they had to stand.
Problem solved!
Except, of course, not really.
The sport of baseball has deep links to the American psyche, but the business of the NFL is America. And like America itself, the NFL almost always elects to punt its problems. Telling players that they can either stand or absent themselves from the national anthem doesn’t address the root cause—that many of the players feel the need to protest something—or solve the real problem—that the next time a populist politician needs a punching bag, they’ll still be able to put psychological distance between the league and its audience. Trump decided to play nice this time, but it’s not hard to imagine him beating up on all of the unpatriotic players who won’t even come on the field for our Great National Anthem the next time he needs to deploy some chaff.
Here’s what the NFL should have said to the players:
You may think, because of the last 20 years of history, that the League is an unassailable machine that prints money. That may have been true in 1990. It is not true now.
Today you can walk into Walmart and buy a 65″ Ultra-HD TV for $470. Meanwhile, if a fan wants to go see a Steelers game, the average ticket is $93 and parking is $40. Do the math: Technology is going to put downward pressure on stadium revenue from here to the horizon and it’s only going to get worse.
Which means this League is going to become ever more dependent on television revenue. Our TV ratings were down 8 percent in 2016 and 9.7 percent in 2017. If ratings keep dropping, the next time we negotiate a TV contract—which is just three years from now, so many of you will still be playing—we’re going to take a haircut. Which means less operating revenue for teams. Which means less money for players. Which means: You.
Now maybe some of this is due to the kneeling and maybe it’s not.
But either way, this League has immediate challenges ahead of it and we need to do everything we can to get ahead of the problems. (And by the way, none of this conversation even touches on the long-term threats the League faces from CTE and the decline in youth participation. That stuff won’t affect you guys, but is going to change the business for the players who come after you.)
That’s the reality of our industry. A few years ago the NHL mandated that players wear face visors. Lots of players didn’t want the visors, but the NHL decided that it was important to the business because fans didn’t want to see players getting hurt. Sometimes athletes have to do things they don’t want to do for the good of the enterprise. For some of you, this may be one of those times.
All of that said, the League understands the underlying point of your protests and we agree with you. The statistics on police use of deadly force are sobering. The statistics on police shootings of African-American men are sobering, too. And the specific cases of misconduct that America has seen over the last few years are simply awful. No matter which side of the culture war you’re on, a case like the murder of Walter Scott and the attempt of police to cover it up, ought to fill you with rage.
So instead of making a gesture by kneeling during the national anthem, we want to try to address the problem in a concrete way. The League is going to start funneling some of its charitable giving to local police departments to fund body cameras. (Many departments already have body cameras, but ongoing data storage is the big cost driver, so we can make a real difference here, even if the jury is still out on cameras’ effectiveness in making police behave better.)
We’re also going to start giving money to help local law enforcement put in place training programs that help police be better at their jobs. And we’re going to support research into programs that can come up with better strategies for collaboration between police and local communities.
You players were concerned about a serious problem in America. We’ve heard you and we agree. And we’re all going to band together and use our business to help ameliorate the problem. So come out onto the field, stand up for the “Star Spangled Banner,” and let’s all be part of the solution.
* * *
Of course, that’s not what the NFL said. Instead of acknowledging that there’s a real problem and taking serious steps to fix it, they’ve come up with a work-around that allows them to pretend there’s no problem at all.
This is how an industry that’s in decline, stays in decline.
As I said up top, the business of the NFL really does bear a striking resemblance to America writ large.
