NFL Teams Will be Fined if Players on the Field Kneel During National Anthem
Kneel on the field? Your club will receive a fine.
Prompted by the actions of former quarterback Colin Kaepernick who, in the name of social justice, began taking a knee during the national anthem, the NFL released a new league policy for players during the national anthem.
The league will allow players to remain in the locker room during the national anthem, but if a player chooses to appear on the field during the anthem, they’re required to stand for the song’s duration.
New NFL anthem policy pic.twitter.com/156URxsqd5
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanDFischer) May 23, 2018
From ESPN:
“This season, all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “Personnel who choose not to stand for the Anthem may stay in the locker room until after the Anthem has been performed.
“We believe today’s decision will keep our focus on the game and the extraordinary athletes who play it — and on our fans who enjoy it.”
A vote took place at the conclusion of the league’s spring meetings and was approved by all 32 owners.
Kaepernick started the trend in August 2016 and other players followed. The NFL said it did not have a rule in place to stop players from kneeling during the anthem. The rulebook only said that players “should” stand for the anthem.
Kneeling during the anthem created a massive backlash from fans, but also from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who did not ease his criticism once he became president.
Fans anticipated the beginning of the games in 2017, eager to see where their favorite players stood (literally), especially after Trump called kneelers a “son of a bitch” while the NFL remained wishy-washy, refusing to take a stand. Some kneeled, some did not.
Needless to say, the NFL Players Association is not pleased:
— NFLPA (@NFLPA) May 23, 2018
I personally do not care. Stand. Kneel. Just play the game. So many of us (especially in political journalism/blogging) use sports as a release. Besides, with so many social media platforms available, you can take your message there.
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Comments
Fire them for cause: progressive cost, and play ball! This isn’t the players’ personal time or space.
the wife and i stopped watching the NFL several years back, her before me.
the kneeling BS just cemented our view that it was a waste of time. hell, pro wrestling is less fake than the 5hitshow that they broadcast every week.
we can always find something more productive to do than supporting them. if all else fails she turns on the Western channel and watches old movies.
opps: i got that backwards…. i gave up long before she finally admitted it was all a sad joke.
i’m waiting for the day she finally quits getting her SI magazine.
Like I care what the union says. I already know that they have contempt for me as a former fan by attempting to force me to watch ungrateful millionaires behave like children.
NFL — I no longer care. I just don’t.
Last year I learned I no longer need the NFL.
So, if an SJW dis-obey’s the rules his team pays a fine. Some penalty.
We are greatly enjoying hockey this year. It’s far too late for the NFL to redeem itself in my eyes. I’m enjoying watching them desperately try to save themselves, though! 🙂
Too little, too late. We’ve seen your true colors, NFL, and we’re never, ever coming back.
Enjoy the continuing decline in your fan base and revenues. You’ve earned it!
How on earth is this a ‘controversial’ policy? It’s about the most the league can do to get it to stop. What’s ‘controversial’ to us out here in fly-over country are millionaire players disrespecting us and our nation.
I love how it’s only conservatives or conservative ideas that are labelled as ‘controversial’ in 2018.
The NFL is driven by beer ads. If people don’t watch, they might not drink as much beer and/or see the ads which drive them to drink more beer. the best indicator of the effect of the players on the game is the rise and fall of beerco stocks.
And of course, I’m also starting to wonder how recreational MJ (their term, not mine) is affecting beer sales. Not too many MJ producers/sellers are advertising on the TV channels during games, so there is a loss of revenue. Someone really needs to tell the players that “fans” watch at their own discretion.
Doesn’t matter, we’re done with the NFL and the NBA. We don’t watch to be preached at by a bunch of overpaid ingrates. The sanctimonious posturing is really getting old. If I wanted to watch that, I’d watch The View.
If businesses were x% black (a big number) what would the SJWs be screaming?
The protesting players can do a wide variety of things, on their own time, with their own money, to either protest or perform some positive actions. They are wealthy and famous.
The kneeling costs them nothing (it costs their teams and owners a lot) so, I have always looked at it as the equivalent of wearing an Aids Ribbon: tacit ‘support’, but doing nothing productive in your free time to actually help.
Personally I am done with football pretty much – and I watch soccer. It is international, diverse, fast-paced and non-political (so far).
soccer is fast paced? you mast tape the shows then watch them in FF mode. 😎
soccer is like watching a track race with no finish line… they just run around a couple of hours, with the occasional fake fall thrown in, and nothing ever happens.
And American football? A play runs for maybe 5 seconds and then what happens: mill around, send in subs, huddle, form a line and repeat. Baseball is not much better, and basketball, why does it take 20 minutes to play the last few minutes of a game?
Oh God, baseball is awful. Watch a fat guy stand there spitting and adjusting himself for three minutes before he finally throws a ball. You can compress all the action in a baseball game to literally about 5 minutes of real time.
Many years ago (30+/-) I worked swing shift so I taped the Monday night games. Supposedly 3 hours in length, as scheduled by the TV station, I found I had to use the 4hr option at the cost of detail as I missed a couple last-minute “thrilling finishes”. My point is that I could watch all the actual football in about 30 minutes, including kickoff and punts; the rest was commercials, huddles, measurements, etc (this was before instant replay).
I liked playing the game, but I long ago stopped devoting an entire Sunday to watching games… Soon will begin either year 3 or 4 of my total boycott. The brain injuries bothered me, but the kneeling by a bunch of borderline thugs ran me right out of the place.
Soccer is literally non-stop action.
I watched the entire world cup finals in 1998, every single game. I went back to watching my beloved Eagles (Iggles around here), and when they went to the first commercial break, I literally jumped up and yelled “What are they doing, the game is still going?”.
I stopped watching football then and there and never went back.
Football has much more scoring and big plays than soccer. The non-stop action is a whole bunch of nothing…oooh look at that beautiful ball, he kicked it just right so the next guy can charge ahead for 10 steps and either get stuffed or pass it backwards.
I have moved on, there is no turning back. I am blackballing all who dared to kneel, and also blackballing those who dared to allow such.
There really is something wrong with briefly taking these ghetto dwellers out of the ghetto, only to see one after another squander their fortunes, and then return to where they started.
Since the NFL bargains with the union and this is a team fine, I believe the union has no standing. But who knows what that corrupt activist group posing for “player’s rights” has won in past negotiations.
What is this NFL you speak of?
WAY too little, WAY too late. They already had a rule on the books – which they IGNORED, and spent the last year lying about the reasons behind it and claiming it wasn’t even hurting their viewers.
The NFL numbers must be truly dismal if they’re doing this before the season even starts.
Changes little or nothing. Jets owner has already said he’ll pay any fines incurred by his players. IOW, sympathetic NFL owners will foot the bill, the NFL can claim they fined offenders, and players will continue to kneel.
If the NFL is going to go with fines they need to fine the individual players, not the teams, and the fines need to escalate with each new offense – $5,000 for first offense, $10,000 for the second, $20,000 for the third, and so on. IOW, make protesting players put their money where their mouths are.
Yes, the NFL can claim they did something, but the fans of the teams that allow it to continue will still lose fans to the “demonstrations”.
I’m not an NFL fan anyways and haven’t watched regularly in years, but this is a pretty shrewd move by the league and that’s why the players union is so mad about it (they have no standing).
By the way, there’s a great civic intelligence acid test for liberals…just look at the sheer number of people on the internet that think this is a violation of the 1st amendment.
“Hey Sarah! That guy in the 49ers uniform lecturing us about Anerican history… Isn’t he the jock who copied your English Lit paper and got his name wrong?”
Shut up and sing. If you truly care about Black Lives, tear yourself away from your drugs and hookers and go volunteer in the inner cities.
I’m native Texan where football is King, and I say the NFL can rot in hell. Haven’t watched a game since this nonsense began.
There are 100 ways to protest America without disrespecting the flag. They do it for the outrage attention.
I’m also pissed at them for gaslighting us about this not the cause for lower attendence and ratings.
But the most clueless moment was spineless Goddell whining that we were disrespecting the NFL. Hey jackass, your organization is downstream from our national symbol. What else did you expect?
Just wait till they ask the taxpayers to fund their new stadium.
Why should the players care about a team fine? Unless it personally hits them in the pocketbook nothing will change. Even then I suspect the fines won’t be large enough. If you’re making a couple of million dollars a year a $5,000 fine is chump change.
What’s the chain of legal authority between the cities and their namesake teams?
Is there a contract? With a morals clause? Can the Mayor of Dallas say “the Cowboys are no longer welcome and kick them out in the middle of the season? Can an unaffiliated team play in the NFL?
Why should I want to watch over privileged football players protest something they know little about? I used to watch the game to see their athleticism and not be lectured about social justice crap. The owners have a simple choice. Let their players make these protests which ultimately destroys the goose laying the golden egg or they can enforce some sort of respect for the fans and the country. Simple choice, but one many are apparently finding difficult.
Not good enough. The players must bear the fines derived from their actions.
This is just masking in hopes the fans will be fooled and come back.
But it’s more than the kneeling that’s caused the fans to leave and the derivation is similar; too much swj support and dilution of the game.
In other words they’ve become political and taken the lefts side.
And like all previous enterprises that have done so they now feel the brunt of the normals refusing to support a political ideology that mocks and disrespects their fans.
NBA should also start taking some hits.
NASCAR may have swerved away from doing the same. We’ll see.
All leftist organizations should expect to see that the more they spread their ideology through their business, the less normal customers will support them.
It’s happened with Hollywood, with the NFL, and others and it will soon become a problem for Amazon and Google and Twitter and Facebook.
Target the normals and you face a force you forgot to measure.
The NFL and professional football are dead to us until they fire every player who kneeled. Every…one…of…them…fired.
Then we’ll talk about some kind of formal apology from the league for not dealing with this from the first occurrence on.
Kneeling is slacktivism, nothing more. You take a stand (by kneeling) and it costs you nothing. College football is way more exciting and much less political. I’ve never gotten excited about professional sports and the whole kneeling thing last year solidified my feelings about them.
Dang! Now I won’t watch NFL football because they’re forcing players to stand during the anthem. I hate being a Conservative. I’ll fight to the death to protect their right to kneel. At the same time, I’ll support the various clubs’ decisions to informally apply respect for the National Anthem and Flag as a hiring requirement. In the meantime, I enjoy having my Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays back (and some Tuesdays).
They make millions of dollars each year, and they’ll be fined a few dollars? Hit them where it REALLY will hurt: the record. If you kneel, you forfeit the game … an automatic loss, end of game, everybody go home. Teams won’t want to play those that knee. If both teams kneel, automatic losses for both teams.
THAT will anger the fans who paid big bucks to see overpaid crybabies kneel, end the game before it starts.