Wearing the wrong headphones will cost players $10,000. That's clearly not enough to deter them, and it's a goddamned bargain for this sort of advertising.


The NFL's deal with Bose is, like many of its other corporate sponsorships, an exclusive one. That means no competing products anywhere they might end up on TV. This leads to coaches and quarterbacks getting confused by their Microsoft Surface tablets, even as oblivious announcers refer to them as "iPads." It also leads to Colin Kaepernick (and almost certainly Richard Sherman) getting slapped with $10,000 fines for wearing the wrong brand of headphones last week.


Kaepernick was cagey when asked if Beats was covering the cost of his fine. ("We'll let that be unanswered," was his exact reply.) But let's be honest: even if it's coming out of his own pocket, $10,000 is a pittance compared to what Beats is paying Kaepernick to endorse the brand. Same goes for Cam Newton, who was rocking Beats during warm-ups today:

Update: Richard Sherman too:


And here's Tom Brady, who isn't even a Beats endorser, flouting the ban before his game in Buffalo today.


Really, what can the NFL do? The schedule of fines doesn't set a maximum on logo violations, but it's probably not in the NFL's best interests—or, more specifically, in Bose's—to escalate this.