Donald Trump’s insulting attack on NFL players left team owners no choice last weekend.
Donald Trump’s insulting attack on NFL players left team owners no choice last weekend: They had their players’ backs after Trump referred to those who don’t stand for the national anthem as a “son of a bitch” and advocated for them to be fired.
It came off as somewhat of a well-organized public relations plan when the email barrage started Saturday and went into Sunday with one NFL owner after the other supporting his players and denouncing Trump. No employer can allow anybody, including the tweeter-in-chief, to take down its entire work force. It’s hard to get a consensus, forget about a unanimous vote, among the owners, but Trump managed to create a bond that rarely exists.
There was one owner’s statement that stood out: New England’s Robert Kraft.
He and Trump are best friends. Kraft donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Kraft told me before the Super Bowl this year that his relationship with Trump was forever bonded when Trump was so attentive and sensitive after Kraft’s wife, Myra, died in 2011.
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So, when Kraft said he was “deeply disappointed” by Trump’s comments, it carried the most weight of any statement made by the NFL or its owners. Kraft is so close to Trump that he’s travelled with him on Air Force One.
The owners’ disgust was genuine. I think they resented him calling their players’ derogatory names more than they were condoning kneeling for the anthem. When Kraft said, “Our players are intelligent, thoughtful and care deeply about our community and I support their right to peacefully affect change and raise awareness in a manner that they feel is most impactful,” he probably wasn’t anticipating pushback from New England fans, who booed the 17 Patriots who elected to kneel during the anthem. Fans in the Boston area burned Patriots gear last week.
NFL owners will back their players until it starts costing them money, meaning advertisers and fans walk away and TV ratings go down.
It’s not hard to connect the dots in this controversy: It starts and ends with Colin Kaepernick.
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If the owners were indeed so supportive of the peaceful protests last year, why does Kaepernick, the founder of this movement in the NFL, continue to be unemployed? He’s still a lightning rod as the first to sit and then kneel for the anthem.
After the events of the last nine days, I thought there might be a couple of owners who would step up and offer Kaepernick a contract to emphasize the support of peaceful protest.
But since Kaepernick didn’t get a sniff from any of these owners, does it make their comments last week hypocritical and a bunch of double talk?
This is a game of dollars and business sense and it’s clear Kaepernick is still bad for business. He’s not an elite player, so teams have refused to subject themselves to the potential backlash for a player considered to have backup skills.
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The owners support their own players. Kaepernick is not their player. If he’s not signed by now after momentum swung in a positive way to him last week, it just may never happen.
SCAB GAMES TURN 30
Happy 30th Anniversary to the three weeks of the lowest level of football in NFL history.
The strike replacement games, designed to break the union, began on the weekend of Oct. 4-5,1987, and led to the collapse of the players’ strike after just 24 days, but also prompted the union to file an antitrust suit against the NFL, which resulted in unrestricted free agency in 1993.
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A couple of memorable things:
– The Giants started 0-2 coming off their first Super Bowl championship. After the league went dark for a week, the strike games began. GM George Young didn’t want to insult his veterans with aggressive signings of replacement players and he assembled a horrible team that handed the baton back to the real Giants at 0-5 after losing all three games. Lawrence Taylor crossed the picket line for the final replacement game, a 6-3 loss in Buffalo. He had two sacks and Bill Parcells even used him at tight end. The Giants finished 6-9.
– The Jets played the final game on a Monday night before the players walked out. They beat the Patriots, 43-24, to start the season 2-0. The Jets replacements lost their first two games before beating the Dolphins in overtime. Starting defensive linemen Mark Gastineau, Marty Lyons and Scott Mersereau played in all three games. The Jets finished 6-9.
– Cowboys fans embraced the replacements, who won their first two games against the Jets and Eagles with QB Kevin Sweeney, who was cut in training camp, coming back for the strike games. For the third game against Washington, which had the best replacement team, Cowboys starting QB Danny White came back and started. One fan at Texas Stadium held up a sign, “White’s a Weenie, We Want Sweeney.”
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Washington, with none of its regular players, beat a Cowboys team with Danny White, Randy White, Tony Dorsett and Too Tall Jones.
When Randy White crossed the line before the first replacement game, Dorsett, then on strike, referred to him as “Captain Scab.” Two weeks later, after Cowboys president Tex Schramm threatened Dorsett that he violated the terms of his contract and he would cut off his post-career annuity, begrudgingly returned for the last game. He said he would get on his knees at midfield and beg Tom Landry not to play him. Landry didn’t listen. Dorsett was the only Cowboys running back to carry the ball: 19 times for 81 yards. Washington won, 13-7.
– Saints coach Sean Payton was a replacement team quarterback for the Bears. He didn’t start any of the three games and was 8-for-23.
TC BACK AGAIN
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Tom Coughlin was at MetLife Stadium two weeks ago for the 10-year anniversary celebration of the 2007 Giants. He’s back on Sunday for the Jets-Jaguars game as Jacksonville’s executive vice president of football operations. If the Jags are down in the third quarter, somebody is going to have to put a seatbelt on Coughlin to prevent him from running down to the sidelines and taking the headset from Doug Marrone… By the way, Charley Casserly’s plan as consultant to Woody Johnson following the 2014 season was to pair Marrone with GM Mike Maccagnan, who had a long friendship. Johnson got cold feet when some anti-Marrone people in Buffalo began leaking information about him to sabotage his chances of getting hired. Marrone had exercised a $4 million opt-out clause of his Bills contract — he was able to trigger it because the team was sold — when he was virtually assured he would get the Jets job to succeed Rex Ryan. Instead, Ryan succeeded Marrone in Buffalo… How badly did Darrelle Revis play in 2016? It’s four weeks into the season and he hasn’t even been invited for a workout.
0-3 PLIGHT
Even though, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, just five of 208 teams to start 0-3 since the 1970 merger have made the playoffs — that’s 2.4% — the Giants can still at least temporarily salvage their season with a victory in Tampa and then next week beat the Chargers at home.
