An unprecedented week in the NFL culminated in a landscape-shifting 24 hours that appear to have dramatically changed the league’s stance on player protests.
In a video message released Friday night, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell responded to a video released Thursday night by a collection of NFL stars, including Michael Thomas, Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson.
Goodell’s video included three specific statements the players in Thursday’s video asked the NFL to make about racism, social injustice and peaceful protests.
“We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people,” Goodell said. “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe that black lives matter.”
The first and third statements matched, word for word, the first and third statements the players asked the league to make the night before.
The middle one didn’t quite match its counterpart. (The players asked for “We, the National Football League, admit wrong in silencing our players from peacefully protesting.”)
But from a forward-looking perspective, it did the job.
Even if the NFL isn’t ready to admit to “silencing” the Kaepernick-led peaceful protests of 2016 and 2017, Goodell’s statement indicates that the league plans to handle future protests differently than how it handled what happened three and four years ago.
Why does this matter?
Because the streets of American cities have, for the past 13 nights, been lined with protesters speaking out in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
Because the past week in the NFL has seen virtual team meetings ignore football and focus on considerably broader world issues.
Because the faces and voices speaking out about the issues that were at the center of Kaepernick’s protests look and sound different than the ones who backed him at the time.
“This is not a black problem,” Colts GM Chris Ballard said this week. “This is a white problem. This is an issue that we have to talk about, and we can’t surgarcoat it. We can’t go back into our bubble.”
President Trump rekindled his war with the league over the issue.
“We should be standing up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart,” Trump tweeted. “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag — NO KNEELING!”
Trump first attacked the N.F.L. over protests during the national anthem in September 2017.
During a campaign rally, he called on owners to fire any players who knelt during the anthem, and used a vulgarity to describe quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who started the movement when he knelt through the previous season to call attention to racial injustice and police brutality.
Kaepernick adopted the kneeling gesture on the advice of a former Green Beret he had met, who suggested it would be a respectful way to call attention to his cause.
More than any other major sports league, the N.F.L. has wrestled in recent years with the issue of race, the lack of African-Americans and other people of color in positions of power in the league and the rights of players to protest social issues on the field.
While three-quarters of the league’s players are African-American, nearly every owner is white and several of the most prominent owners are strong supporters of Trump.
“What Colin was protesting was something that should be respected by all humans,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said Friday. “That did take a lot of courage. That is something that is 1,000% wrong and what he was trying to fix and bring light to. And gosh, it was hard to bring light to the whole country because people didn’t want to totally hear it, and it got diluted with so much different stuff.”
Given everything that went down between the time Kaepernick began protesting in 2016 and the day in May 2018 when NFL team owners tried to implement a restrictive policy on player protests, the league surely has more work to do to convince its players and the public that it has come around on this issue.
But Goodell’s statement Friday said that the league would “encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest.”
This allows us to look ahead to an NFL season in which players might be more emboldened than ever to speak out and stand up for what they believe, and owners might be more reluctant to tamp down protests than to allow them.