You Will Anyway: Shame on the NFL

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Shame on the NFL

Having gotten all the public relations it wanted (even a hackneyed Sports Illustrated cover), NFL leadership is now back to the more familiar demeanor of reminding its players to either get in line or join the unemployment line. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Monday that any player who is “disrespectful to the flag” won’t play. The league, then, itself upped the ante by feeding this tidbit to ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, which he reported before the station’s broadcast of Monday Night Football.

Deadspin

ESPN must have aired a negative opinion of the NFL's stance, thus incurring the nasty Trump tweet which is undoubtedly a lie (well, two lies), but hey, HE thinks ratings are everything, so nothing could be worse than "tanking" ratings.

"Peer pressure." What a fucking clueless idiot. But there is a pressure he WANTS them to succumb to: boss pressure.

No kidding? Thtat's the last person we would have guessed.

What the heck is the the “game operations manual”? Officially titled “Policy Manual for Member Clubs,” it’s not a document easily accessed from the NFL website, like the NFL rulebook is. Indeed, the only current portion of the document publicly available is the short anthem-related portion the league has been feeding to various sources for several weeks. But the policy—the NFL is clear to define it as such, rather than “rule”—hasn’t always been phrased that way.

The policy is not given to players, is not part of the annual Player Policies handed out to all players, and does not apply to them.
[...]

The 2014 policy reads that failure to be on the field by the start of the national anthem may “result in disciplinary action from the League office.” The version currently being promulgated by the NFL revises this to read “result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violation of the above, including first offenses.”

That’s a pretty big change for two reasons: They’ve added a lot of punishment, and they’ve removed the language that punishment would come from the league office.

Deadspin

Dear NFL players: sit. You can afford it. It won't last more than one game.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Well, gee, according to Dolt 45, Hill is why ESPN's ratings "tanked". I haven't been following that story, so you'll have to Google it up yourself if you haven't been either and want to know what's going on there.

UPDATE 10/13: The NFL will not issue a mandate for players to stand.

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"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

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"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

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"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.