Burroughs High School not only beat their much higher ranked opponent, a team they’d never beat before, after this patriotic anthem display but they’ve not lost another game since. Photo Credit: Long Room and watch the video.

Once again those NFL players choosing to “take a knee” during the anthem have apparently suffered from Self Inflicted Degradation of Performance Syndrome or SIDOPS where every NFL team which had at least one player “taking a knee” during the anthem not only lost their game, but did so in embarrassing or record-setting fashion.

In September the original SIDOPS research suggested that protesting NFL players were inducing a performance debilitating conflict into their brain when they protested. The SIDOPS phenomena was revisited again in October in not only trending negative team and individual player outcomes, but included expanded the research to include similarly afflicted European and High School sports teams.

Now, during the NFL’s week nine all three teams who had at least one player kneel during the anthem, the Seahawks, the Giants and the 49’ers – all lost and lost well outside of their predictive “Vegas” odds.

Week 9 results

On Sunday the “kneeling” Giants hosted the “non-kneeling” Rams where the home team was a modest 3-point underdog. Yet the Giants lost in such an incredible fashion, 51-17, that it set a new “collapse” standard … modernizing the team’s 1964 52-21 drubbing taken from Cleveland.

Three thousand miles away, the NFL odds makers shouted confidently that the home team– 7.5 point favorites — would dominate their visitors claiming: “INJURY-PLAGUED REDSKINS ARE BIG UNDERDOGS VS LEGION OF BOOM”.

Yet it was the “non-kneeling” Redskins who played above expectations while the SIDOPS-impacted “anthem kneeling” Seahawks couldn’t seem to get out of their own way. The team came off of their anthem protest and promptly set a modern team record in committing 16 penalties (one would have to go back to the Orwellian year of 1984 to find a more penalized game for the Hawks) while missing all of their post-touchdown conversions and all three of their field goal attempts!

While the Seahawks and Giants demonstrated the lack of concentration and athleticism, no team so embodies the debilitating SIDOPS trend than San Francisco, which lost to the Cardinals by 10 despite being only 2-point underdogs.

This loss also extended the 49ers “taking a knee” record to 23 losses out of 25 games – that’s a 92 percent loss percentage since the team first supported the anthem protest in August 2016. It’s important to note that this “protest movement” was initiated during the important campaign period leading up to the 2016 Presidential election and despite well-published Harvard research that showcases that there is no racial bias in police shootings — the persistent cornerstone of the protestor’s claims.

In a positive turn of events, the last iteration of SIDOPS suggested there may be an opposite impact where a team showcasing unity and focus during the anthem may perform above their expectations. This theory held true when tiny California Division 9 Burroughs — relying on their backup quarterback — stunned their never-before-defeated Division 3 opponents after the home team sang a patriotic song, held U.S. Flags and honored the Anthem by standing. Moreover, perhaps as a tribute to the power of positive thinking, Burroughs has not lost a game since their “flag-waiving” miracle October 20 performance.

Now, despite the positive anthem trend from Burroughs California and possibly in response to the prodigious evidence impugning the basis of the NFL “kneeling” movement, that state’s NAACP President Alice Huffman has decided to honor the movement not by utilizing facts… but by simply bypassing the protest’s “logic” and instead looking to simply ban the national anthem altogether claiming this action will solve the NFL’s problems:

“We owe a lot of it to Kaepernick… I think all this controversy about the knee will go away once the song is removed.”

To this end, the NAACP has prepared two resolutions to submit to state legislators in January thus ensuring the NFL’s “taking a knee” exercise will continue to gain the national media and political attention the movement seeks for weeks to come — especially in California and with the 49ers. To this end, the SIDOPS phenomena should be factored into the official “Vegas” odds-maker system and the routine ‘under performance’ predictive analytic becomes more irrefutable.

— Andre Billeaudeaux

Andre Billeaudeaux is a retired military journalist and has published extensively on topics centered on social science, psychology, politics and history. He studied psychology under Dr. Phil Zimbardo of Stanford and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Native American Guardian’s Association.