Can the NFL silence Trump and prevail in national anthem controversy?

Erik Brady | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Is the NFL in crisis mode? From anthem protests to domestic violence to President Trump and from looming labor disputes to CTE, the NFL is at a crossroads regarding its future.

The Chicago Bears and Baltimore Ravens will play in the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game on Thursday in Canton, Ohio. It’s the NFL’s first exhibition – and first national anthem – of the 2018 season. And it marks the start of a third year of bombs bursting in air in a three-way dispute among NFL owners and players and President Donald Trump.

Days before the Bears and Ravens last met, in Baltimore in mid-October, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sent the league’s 32 teams a memo. “We need to move past this controversy,” he wrote, “and we want to do that together with our players.” Yet here we are, almost 10 months later, little closer to closure.

The NFL and NFL Players Association are talking, but there were stumbles along the way. The NFL announced in May that teams would be fined if players didn’t stand for the anthem, though players could choose to stay in the locker room as it played. The NFLPA filed a grievance about that in July. The NFL put the policy on hold while it talks some more.

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All this comes two years since Colin Kaepernick declined to stand for the anthem before a San Francisco 49ers preseason game. He called it a protest against institutionalized racial oppression. The NFL has mostly mismanaged the controversy since.

“If the NFL’s answer is ‘We’re simply going to stop them from doing it,’ good luck,” crisis communication executive Dan McGinn says. “It’s not going to work. … That may feel good short-term. It’s a deadly long-term strategy. You cannot be a white-owned business telling African-American employees they cannot express their views.”

USA TODAY Sports spoke about the anthem controversy with McGinn, founder and CEO of McGinn and Company, a communication consulting practice; Frank Luntz, political consultant and pollster and founder and CEO of Luntz Global, a communication strategy firm; and Malcolm Jenkins, Philadelphia Eagles safety and co-founder of the Players Coalition, a charity and advocacy organization. (USA TODAY Sports spoke with McGinn and Luntz last week and with Jenkins in June.)

“You’re left with owners sniping at each other, players and owners” sniping, McGinn says. “The president is using them for political fodder. Come on! You’re running a business here, (and) you’re hardening feelings on both ends of the spectrum.”

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones proclaimed his players would be required to stand, “toe on the line,” regardless of NFL policy. Trump, who lambastes the league regularly, tweeted his approval of that. Then news media reports surfaced that the NFL ordered Jones not to talk about it anymore.

Luntz figures that’s the NFL’s best strategy: Say nothing.

“The president has the largest bully pulpit on the face of the Earth,” he says. “The NFL may be the most popular sport, but the president’s bully pulpit is even louder. And the problem is it is very hard to explain to someone that silence is the best strategy.”

Reticence is not what Jones is known for.

“I understand that,” Luntz says. “These are two very powerful people. But the president controls the agenda, and this president is going to make his opinions known.”

Trump has been making them known since he said of Kaepernick: “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him.” That was August 2016. Trump has bludgeoned the NFL relentlessly since.

“It galvanizes his base,” Luntz says. “It plays well where he plays well.”

And where it doesn’t play well? “That’s not Trump’s America.”

Look to the NBA

Most of the NFL owners are white men with an average age just shy of 70. McGinn suggests they should look to the NBA for answers – and not because the NBA has a rule that players must stand for the anthem.

“It’s because of all the other things they do that they can have that,” he says. “It’s a league where the players have a tremendous social media presence where they can express their views. … In the NBA, they have to stand, but nobody feels they’re muzzled, that they’re disrespected. They just don’t feel that way. But in the NFL, they do.”

McGinn doesn’t pretend to have a solution.

“I’ve worked in all kinds of very controversial issues where there is no magical answer,” he says. “But there is a hell of a lot smarter answers than the one they’ve come up with now. They know it. They don’t like it. But I think they should have put more effort into it. They should have been more creative."

Luntz says he is friends with a number of NFL owners and has given some anthem advice. What did he say? “You know I can’t answer that,” he says, offering only that all stakeholders need to participate in crafting a policy.

“They really don’t know what to do, and you can see it,” McGinn says. “They zig and zag. It’s not working for them. And they feel enormous pressure from the president. They feel enormous pressure from the players, all conflicting pressures. The owners are torn. They have public positions and private positions.”

Put the anthem issue aside, McGinn says, and the NFL has many other troubles: “Their audience is significantly white, it is significantly older, and it is significantly wedded to TV. That’s not a good formula.”

Then there is the specter of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as CTE. The anthem dispute is less an existential threat, “but it’s a window into the mentality and a window into the process of the NFL,” McGinn says, “and it doesn’t leave you encouraged.”

Luntz says the anthem debate will be more prominent in the preseason than in the regular season. “At some point, it just burns itself out,” he says. “It will be a bigger issue Week 1 than Week 16.”

McGinn offers a different view: “It’ll be with them probably throughout the Trump presidency.”

Luntz says he attends an NFL game somewhere in the country just about every week of the season. “I love it because politics has no place in it," he says. "Please, let’s keep politics out of football. Just give us one day. We give the Lord one day a week. Let’s give football one day a week.”

Never mind that the Lord and football must share their Sundays.

'We wanted to spark that dialogue'

Jenkins visited the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, which enrolls students who have had trauma in their lives, in Washington in June. He had scheduled it as a place he’d rather be than the Trump White House, where the team was scheduled to appear with the president after winning the Super Bowl. The White House invitation was ultimately rescinded.

“Players have been doing (good works) for a long time, which is the main reason for the protests,” Jenkins says. “It wasn’t like Colin Kaepernick knelt and the players started opening their 501(c)(3)s.

"But now there’s this huge wave and movement. There’s always going to be people who disagree and naysayers, but even the fact that they have to respond to our stance means they’re listening as well. We wanted to spark that dialogue.”

Jenkins is insulted by the notion that raising questions of racial injustice is somehow an intrusion on a football game.

“The national anthem lasts for, what, two minutes?” he says. “There’s a three-hour game that still goes on afterward. They can still focus on football. They don’t take that same stance when we do an entire month around breast cancer. When there was a campaign against domestic violence, nobody wrote letters about how we don’t do this stuff on Sunday.

“It’s only when we start talking about black issues – things that have to do with race, all these issues that we as a country like to run from. That’s when all of a sudden they say, ‘We want to concentrate on football on Sunday, and we don’t want to deal with anything else.’ If you don’t want to deal with this on Sunday, how about Monday through Saturday?”

The goal, Jenkins says, is to shine a light on issues players care about and to get something done about them.

“We can create a country that can stand behind the national anthem and what it stands for, stand behind the flag when we feel like we have justice and equality," he says. "And then we can all go back to enjoying our Sundays.”