Getty Images

The month began with Nike rolling out a major ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick. Before that, the company almost severed ties with him.

As explained by Julie Creswell, Kevin Draper, and Sapna Maheshwari of the New York Times, Nike debated severing ties with Kaepernick in the summer of 2017, and Nike “very nearly did.” Per the report, a “top communications executive” at Nike eventually made a persuasive case for keeping Kaepernick on the corporate roster of athlete endorsers. Kaepernick stayed there for a year, basically in mothballs.

Then came the 30th anniversary of the “Just Do It” campaign, and Nike decided to dust off its relationship with Kaepernick, and to take it to an unprecedented level.

In the end, Nike balanced the risk of alienating the NFL, for which Nike has been the exclusive apparel provider since 2012 and will be until at least 2028, against the “credibility the company would gain with the young, urban market it has long targeted.”

And that’s exactly the point that should have been widely made after the deal emerged. Nike isn’t doing “the right thing.” Nike is doing what it believes will be the profitable thing. Because Nike, as a publicly-traded company, has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to make as much money as possible.

So far, it has worked. To the point where Kaepernick’s supporter and partner in protests has finally gotten an NFL contract, and the world somehow has kept spinning.