ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith shot down Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr calling the NFL’s new National Anthem policy “idiotic,” instead opting to label it “cowardly.”

“I don’t think the word is idiotic,” Smith stated. “The more appropriate word to me is cowardly. That is what I think about when I think of the NFL … with this new policy. They don’t want to just man up, per se, and tell you what this is about and just leave it at that and stand on those principles.”

Smith accused the NFL of “passing the buck.”

He said, “They don’t want to stand up and admit flagrantly, this is what it is about. It is about the business of the National Football League, this is what our decision and that is that. What they want to do as a league is to give the impression that they are addressing it but in the same breath empowering individual teams to be able to do something about it in their own way — sort of passing the buck, per se.”

“I think that is where Steve Kerr’s criticism really, really came in because they are not standing up as a league, stating who they are and what they are about and why and just leaving it at that,” Smith continued. “They are sort of tacitly going about the business of addressing it, while putting more of the owners on individual teams as if they are not the umbrella hovering over those teams and they want things to be handled from there, which to me speaks to cowardice as opposed to idiocy.”

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