Here’s how the 2016 performance of the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback compares to the 2017 performance of each team’s most recent starter, using a stat called adjusted net yards per attempt.
The Real Problem: The Militarization of the NFL
Professional sports should stop shilling for the warfare state.
Before 2009, Colin Kaepernick would have had to find some other way to protest racism against African Americans. That’s because until the height of the Iraq War, NFL football players weren’t even required to leave the locker room for the national anthem, much less stand for it.
.. The singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” was mandated during another war, World War II, when the NFL commissioner at the time mandated it for the league. The players were told to stand for it about the same time that the Department of Defense was ramping up massive recruitment and media operations around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began paying sports teams millions in U.S. tax dollars for what amounted to “paid patriotism,” or mega-military spectacles on the playing field before the games. It got so bad that there was a congressional investigation led by none other than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a veteran and considered one of the most patriotic men in the Senate.
.. What McCain and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) found was that between 2012 and 2015, the DOD shelled out $53 million to professional sports—including $10 million to the NFL—on “marketing and advertising” for military recruitment. To be sure, some of that was bona fide advertising. But many of those heart-tugging ceremonies honoring heroes and recreating drills and marches and flyovers are what the report denounced as propaganda.
.. given when and how it was mandated for players to honor it, the national anthem has been used a prop in this near-religious convocation. In recent years, soldier parading, flag-waving, and jumbotron shout-outs to warriors have become de rigueur at NFL games. Consider the display put on at Super Bowl 50: A flyover by the Blue Angels fighter jets, and 50 representatives of all military branches singing “America the Beautiful” against a backdrop of a giant flag. During the game,a Northop Grumman advertisement proudly announced America’s conceptual sixth-generation fighter jet “of the future” to an unsuspecting audience, a year after it presented its new long-range bomber during Super Bowl XLIX. How much that ad time cost the company is anyone’s guess, but it is no surprise that defense contractors are hawking their billion-dollar war wares between game play these days.
.. Postwar affluence and the increase in white-collar jobs, when combined with concerns about the power of the Soviet Union, led many Americans to fear that men were too effeminate and weak. These anxieties created fertile soil for the growth of football, which became a way to affirm masculinity and fight the supposed “muscle gap.” If you didn’t embrace football—which seemed to embody Cold War ideas of containment—you might be suspected of deviant behavior like homosexuality or communism.
.. But isn’t that the problem? “Football is a warlike game and we are now a warlike nation. Our love for football is a love, however self-aware, of ourselves as a fighting and (we hope) victorious people
.. football—with its obsessive territorialism, regimented hierarchy, and peculiar combination of strategic prowess with brute force—has always been at risk of militaristic co-option.
Trump’s Empty Culture Wars
The secret of culture war is that it is often a good and necessary thing.
.. But in the sweep of American history, it’s the battles over cultural norms and so-called social issues — over race and religion, intoxicants and sex, speech and censorship, immigration and assimilation — that for better or worse have often made us who we are.
.. A bad culture war is one in which attitudinizing, tribalism and worst-case fearmongering float around unmoored from any specific legal question
.. a master, too, of taking social and cultural debates that could be important and necessary and making them stupider and emptier and all about himself.
.. he is unique as well in that unlike most culture warriors — who are usually initially idealists, however corrupted they may ultimately become — he has never cared about anything higher or nobler than himself, and so he’s never happier than when the entire country seems to be having a culture war about, well, Donald Trump.
.. Trump has made it much, much worse, by multiplying the reasons one might reasonably kneel — for solidarity with teammates, as a protest against the president’s behavior, as a gesture in favor of free speech, as an act of racial pride — and then encouraging his own partisans to interpret the kneeling as a broad affront to their own patriotism and politics.
.. So now we’re “arguing” (I use the term loosely) about everything from the free-speech rights of pro athletes to whether the national anthem is right-wing political correctness to LeBron James’s punditry on the miseducation of Trump voters … and the specific issue that Kaepernick intended to raise, police misconduct, is buried seven layers of controversy deep.
.. First, can we have the greater accountability for cops that activists reasonably demand, in which juries convict more trigger-happy officers and police departments establish a less adversarial relationship to the communities they police
.. Second, can we continue the move toward de-incarceration — supported, not that long ago, by Republicans as well as Democrats — without reversing the gains that have made many of our cities safe?
.. we need a social and cultural debate focused on the substance that Colin Kaepernick’s choice of protest unfortunately obscured, and Donald Trump’s flagsploitation has deliberately buried. Not an end to culture war, but a better culture war — in which victory and defeat can be defined, and peace becomes a possibility.
As Trump Takes On Athletes, Watch Them Rise
Trump, in an Emperor Nero complaining about the desultory quality of the gladiators moment, also lamented in Alabama that the N.F.L. had become insufficiently violent.
.. It’s not clear how this plays with Goodell’s masters in N.F.L. ownership. They donated many millions to Trump’s presidential campaign; the New England Patriots’ owner, Robert K. Kraft, showered $1 million on the inaugural and has been a vocal ally; and the Patriots’ coach, Bill Belichick, wrote a letter endorsing him last fall.
.. To summarize this exquisite collision of sports, politics and business: The 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem last season, stirring a national debate about patriotism and the treatment of blacks by the police. For that, the N.F.L. owners appear to have blackballed him from the league this year. For that, more players have taken up Kaepernick’s cause. And for that, President Trump disparaged the league and challenged the owners to fire players for exercising their right to free speech — which they have effectively done to Kaepernick already.
And now Kaepernick’s once lonely protest suddenly has many more supporters.
.. They have been active citizens, and that is stirring. This cuts both ways. If an athlete were to engage in protests against, say, abortion or gay rights, that would be no less in keeping with our nation’s finest free speech traditions.
.. It’s striking how completely the president has stood this principle on its head. He taunted N.F.L. owners, urging them to fire players who engage in anthem protests.
“They’ll be the most popular person in this country,” Trump said, “because that’s a total disrespect of our heritage, that’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for.”
.. The president’s invocation of heritage has become his favorite dog whistle; it also deeply misconstrues our traditions. I’ll recruit my departed father into this scrum. Like many young men of his generation, he volunteered to fight in World War II, and he flew missions on a B-17 bomber. Years later, when Vietnam and civil rights and labor struggles bubbled, and protesters sat out anthems and even burned flags, his view was unwavering: He had fought for an America in which citizens could speak and dissent freely and act morally.
.. Curry has not been as explicitly political as James in recent years, but he did not sidestep the moment. President Trump said he was barring Curry from the White House, but Curry had already made a case for not going.
“By acting and not going, hopefully that will inspire some change,” he said, “when it comes to what we tolerate in this country and what is accepted and what we turn a blind eye to.”
The president is an expert provocateur, and one does well not to underrate him. But notice how the athletes’ eyes are so wide open.