Ben Gilbert

The NFL has very little net income.

Who cares what its tax filing status is?

Right.

The teams are their own taxpaying entities and their own businesses.

And so Roger Goodell makes $40-plus million a year to do what the owners want, and they hire him to do that, and they will fire him if he doesn't do that.

Back to Colin Kaepernick.

So in the good old days of football, it was a bunch of reasonably young enterprising owners who loved football and owned teams.

It wasn't clear if they were going to be good businesses or not, but the league as itself and thus all the owners were

cowboys trying to make it for themselves in the world.

And those people all got old and didn't want to change at all.

Yes.

And so now there's these very interesting artifacts of the league being grown up, old and stodgy, the incumbent, something like that, when they were once a startup, especially when it comes to just acknowledging that a guy can protest the national anthem.

He was using the NFL's platform to sort of make a very personal argument.

Right.

And we should say what actually happened, Kaepernick in 2016 took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality in the U.S.

After that season, he was a free agent.

Zero teams signed him.

And of course, he had some disappointing seasons and injuries.

But let's be real here.

Oh, Kaepernick filed a grievance and eventually reached a confidential settlement with the NFL.