David Rosenthal

Oh, man, there are these great quotes in America's Game where the owners are talking about Pete Rizal with the representative of the players at the time they're negotiating contracts and the players are complaining that Pete Rizal isn't being neutral in these negotiations.

The owners are like...

Of course he's neutral.

We pay him damn well to be neutral.

So yeah, the commissioner of the NFL is like the ultimate in shareholder responsibility.

In fact, shareholder responsibility is his only responsibility.

Now, most of those people are dead, and it's their descendants who are also old who own these teams.

Yep.

I do think when that happened in 2016, it was a lot more of a radical act than it might seem today.

And there were a lot of people at the time who were deeply offended by it.

And there were a lot of people in the NFL who understood why he was doing it because 70% of the NFL is black.

So there was a lot going on here.

The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick after this.

Yeah, and I think the interesting thing for the purposes of our discussion here about this is,

I don't think this ever would have happened or happened in the same way in the NBA.

The NBA embraced both social media and the strategy of letting players have their own platforms, be their own voices, and promote the league through that.

And the NFL was the opposite of that.

They were the command and the control.

We own the message.

And there was no clearer example of this.