As if there were any doubt that the NFL was going to continue its blacklist against Colin Kaepernick, the former Super Bowl starting quarterback was once again denied an opportunity this week. This time, it was in Seattle, and there was none of the hemming and hawing about Kaepernick’s numbers not being good enough or his playstyle not being the right fit for the offense. No, instead, an NFL source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that Seahawks officials cancelled Kaepernick’s workout after he refused to commit to ending his kneeling protests during the national anthem during the 2018 season. (Sure enough, on Friday, the Seahawks went ahead and found someone else for the job.)

Seahawks 'postpone' Colin Kaepernick audition over anthem protest stance Read more

This comes just days after Kaepernick’s former teammate, Pro Bowl safety Eric Reid – the first 49ers player to join Kaepernick in his protest in 2016 – was approaching a contract with the Cincinnati Bengals only to be confronted by team owner Mike Brown, who asked him to commit not to kneel during the anthem in 2018. After going through a series of workouts with coaches and sensing interest, Reid was again confronted, this time by Bengals coach Marvin Lewis. Lewis asked Reid if he wished to clarify his stance on anthem kneeling for ownership. Reid declined, and the meeting was over shortly thereafter. Reid, like Kaepernick, remains unsigned.

As Reid tweeted in March, “[General Managers] aren’t the hold up, owners are.” Football people like Bengals defensive coordinator Teryl Austin recognize players like Reid still have something to offer NFL squads. It’s owners like Brown who feel threatened by a powerful voice like Reid’s or a Kaepernick’s in their locker rooms, on their fields, and perhaps most crucially, on their television sets.

This should come as no surprise, particularly after Houston Texans owner Bob McNair came out and told the media he “regretted apologizing” for one of the most disgusting comments of the 2017 season, when McNair said at an owners meeting, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” McNair continues to claim he wasn’t actually referring to the players, but the context of the original report containing the quote, from Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham of ESPN Magazine, suggests otherwise.

The owners meetings referenced above included an impassioned plea from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to take the business impact of the continued kneeling protests seriously. Jones implored his fellow owners to institute a mandate that would force all players to stand for the national anthem under threat of a fine. One of Jones’s main allies in the room, Washington owner Dan Snyder, claimed that an absurd “96 percent” of Americans are against kneeling (a CNN poll from September 2017 said that number was actually 49 percent).

The truth, though, is that the owners are not making business decisions when they refuse the services of men like Kaepernick and Reid. As Van Natta and Wickersham reported, the NFL’s major sponsors were not universally pro ban. In fact, at least one had threatened to drop its sponsorship of the league should it mandate the players to stand for the national anthem. If it was really about the bottom line, would the NFL have tried to buy out kneeling players for $100m in charitable contributions in 2017?

No, these decisions are made almost solely to maintain the cultural and institutional power of men like Brown, Jones and Snyder. And men like McNair, who said this offseason, “Our playing field is not the place for political statements [and] not the place for religious statements. It’s the place for football. I think we all need to respect our flag and respect our country. I think we’ll figure out a way to make sure that we do that.”

Money makes football powerful, but so does its reach. No other sport dominates American culture and media like the gridiron, and while the NFL primarily exists to sell the product on the field, there can no doubt that the NFL also sells a very specific set of values every Sunday. As John Harbaugh summed up in his 2015 letter, Why Football Matters:

“Football is hard. It’s tough. It demands discipline. It teaches obedience. It builds character.”

After years, even decades of hearing such platitudes on NFL broadcasts and pre-game shows, it can be hard to recognize these values as political. But it is impossible to separate football’s demands of discipline and obedience from the way McNair, Jones and many of the NFL’s owners see on-field player activism. Thus, when even a player like Kaepernick – a quarterback who led his team to the Super Bowl at age 26, and one of the most physically talented players at the position – dared to say something is bigger than football, his continued presence became unacceptable. It’s why when Reid tried to land a job in Cincinnati, both the head coach and owner pressed him to commit not to kneel in 2018 before they would even consider a contract offer.

Robert Griffin III is filling a spot that should belong to Colin Kaepernick Read more

It’s good, at least, that the owners have stopped bothering to pretend it’s about anything else but showing their power for the world – and for any players who might be considering a protest this season – to see. In a world where Colin Kaepernick remains unsigned but Harbaugh’s Baltimore Ravens found a place for Robert Griffin III, a quarterback with a wrecked knee and just 14 appearances, six touchdowns and nine interceptions to his name since 2014, any delusions about the blackball of Kaepernick having anything to do with the league’s product should be put to rest.

The political statement McNair and the rest of the owners are trying to keep off the football field in their crusade against on-field activism is one America absolutely needs to hear. Systemic racism and police brutality are a daily reality for black Americans, and despite the NFL’s posturing, these issues are bigger than the game. And let’s not forget that it is not just people who are indignant over protests during the anthem who will stop watching football. For every person who blusters about quitting the league over the “anthem protests,” there will be others who see the owners’ cowardly attempts to stifle the speech and expression of the players and think twice about devoting their Sundays to a game with no soul.

By kneeling for themselves and their brethren, Reid and Kaepernick have become a threat to the NFL. They don’t just threaten to sully the league’s image, to remind everybody watching at home and in the stands that the NFL is part of an America that brutally and systematically opresses black Americans. Kaepernick, Reid and anybody else who would dare kneel in 2018 also threaten the league’s ironclad grip on the values of obedience and discipline, and that is a threat that cannot be brooked by such small, angry men as Bob McNair, Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. But Reid and Kaepernick will not submit, and for that crime, we should expect the NFL’s unofficial but blatantly obvious blackballing to continue through 2018, and, in all likelihood, beyond.