Ben Gilbert

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.

I mean, the whole macro thing here is very strange of the owners to let this seemingly minor thing turn into the gigantic media mess the way that they did.

But bottom line, the NFL wildly mishandled this, let it get completely out of hand.

This is the way that we know of Colin Kaepernick now.

He's sort of like an icon for this thing.

So, I mean, if what the NFL wanted to do was not amplify his protest by making him not able to play, it totally blew up in their face.

And he became a national headline for months and months and months.