Tuesday, December 12, 2017

The Delicious Irony of the NFL’s Flag Problem

This is an absolutely delicious irony. Government at state and local levels has spent billions of dollars building football stadiums. The federal government has spent millions of dollars promoting admiration for the military at football games. Government at all levels has spent millions on scholarships for football players who end up going into the NFL, not to mention the millions (billions?) spent on football at the middle school and high school level.

And now what it do they get in return? They get people who refuse to honor the national symbol. And the fallout from that is that people have stopped going to the games. Billions of dollars worth of stadiums now sitting empty during the very events they were built to host. What to do?

If the owners decide to stay the course (i.e., do nothing), they will soon have so few fans that they cannot meet their payrolls, and they will go bankrupt. Then what will the stadiums be used for?

If they do decide to force players to stand before the national anthem, many players will simply stop playing the game. This means that the talent pool will become very thin, and the teams will lose fans. Or perhaps the players will knuckle under. In that case, the backlash will take a form that I cannot predict, I certainly cannot expect a player who gives in to maintain his self-respect or the respect of those who currently support him as he takes the knee.

I have no reason to believe that this will result in a groundswell of sentiment to get government out of the sports biz. The boycott is, after all, loud and clear testimony that Americans love their government no matter what it does.

But it is fun to watch the fat cat football execs and the political class squirm for a while.

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