{"id":179892,"date":"2017-09-24T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T01:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/09\/24\/dont-normally-comment-on-football-but\/"},"modified":"2017-09-24T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T01:26:00","slug":"dont-normally-comment-on-football-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/09\/24\/dont-normally-comment-on-football-but\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Normally Comment on Football, but \u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a> I have commented on some egregious calls calls by the officials<\/a>, when I it felt that it had to do with the unfair treatment of referees by the league.<\/div>\n

This weekend, Donald Trump went after the league because some players kneeled during the national anthem to protest racism, and in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who has been shut out of the league by craven management.<\/p>\n

Trump tweeted, and the players and owners just told Trump to go Cheney himself<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some stood. Some kneeled. Some remained in the locker room, choosing to speak through their absence from the NFL\u2019s pregame ceremonies, in which the American flag is displayed and the national anthem sung. But from London to Los Angeles, virtually all NFL players on the sidelines before kickoff of Sunday\u2019s slate of 14 games locked arms with each other in response to President Trump\u2019s three-day campaign demanding that team owners \u201cfire or suspend\u201d players who kneel during the national anthem and calling on fans to boycott games if the form of protest continued. <\/p>\n

The silent rebuke to the president, determined independently by each of the 28 NFL teams in action Sunday, represented an unprecedented collective action and show of solidarity among players who battle against one another 16 weeks, some more, each season. <\/p>\n

Some, such as the Jacksonville Jaguars, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins, were joined on the sideline by their team owners, Shahid Khan, Jeffrey Lurie and Daniel Snyder, respectively. Most were joined in standing shoulder-to-shoulder by coaches, staff and, in some cases, police officers. <\/p>\n

All but two of the NFL\u2019s 32 team owners and CEOs issued statements Saturday night and through Sunday in response to Trump\u2019s crusade against protesting NFL players, which began in earnest during a Friday night rally in Alabama. After making a thinly veiled allusion to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate by taking a knee during August 2016 preseason games to protest police violence against minorities, Trump called on NFL coaches to get the \u201cson of a bitch\u201d players off the field if they continued to kneel. The president repeated his call with no less intensity on Twitter on Saturday and Sunday morning.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Among the more notable was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a vocal Trump supporter and a $1 million donor to his inaugural.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no greater unifier in this country than sports and, unfortunately, nothing more divisive than politics,\u201d Kraft wrote in his statement released Sunday morning<\/a>. \u201cI think our political leaders could learn a lot from the lessons of teamwork and the importance of working together toward a common goal.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well done, but Colin Kaepernick has still not been signed. <\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll wait to hear about that.  (BTW, if the Raven’s performance today is any indication, sign him.) <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have commented on some egregious calls calls by the officials, when I it felt that it had to do with the unfair treatment of referees by the league. This weekend, Donald Trump went after the league because some players kneeled during the national anthem to protest racism, and in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[573,374,503],"class_list":["post-179892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-donald-trump","tag-politics","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179892"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}