When mistakes were made, but in a sense, no one is to blame - while in another, more accurate sense, you are.
You could say the NFL’s present crisis began on Friday, when Donald Trump, speaking at a rally on behalf of Alabama Senator Luther Strange, attacked NFL players who kneel during the national anthem as a protest against police violence inflicted on people of color, criticizing not just the players but team owners and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in the speech and subsequent tweets. You could say it began during the NFL preseason last year, when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first sat and then knelt in protest, followed by others. But this has been longer in coming; years, in fact, years in which the NFL, through the decisions of its leadership and the owners that hire and retain that leadership, has positioned itself to benefit from cultural politics while keeping actual politics at a distance. But the gates have fallen; politics is running rampant through the NFL, and the NFL is utterly, farcically unprepared for it.
The league’s commitment to a kind of reductive, performative patriotism is self-evident - the jet flyovers, the field-sized flags, the military family reunions, at once heartening and queasily exploitative. The NFL has certainly made money from ostentatious flag-waving because it was literally paid to do so. This is very much of a piece with the league’s attempt to persuade anyone who’ll listen that it is a Great American Institution, and its management, especially Goodell, presents as a kind of cargo cult of serious, meaningful organizations. Goodell even does an annual press availability that is really called (by adults!) The State of the NFL Address, and has been banging on for years about “protecting the shield”, meaning, presumably, the sacred honor of a sports league. The idea here is that the game of professional football has an inherent, social purpose of consequence to the country, and that therefore promoting and enforcing the league’s supposed values - one of which is patriotism - is a matter of national concern.
This is, of course, transparent nonsense; indeed, it is duplicitous and malicious nonsense coming from a league that has used its resources to hide the ongoing player health crisis that may someday be its downfall; that may have finally passed the culminating point for bilking local communities to enrich owners; and that is still unable to address domestic violence allegations against its players with anything but an incompetence that would be laughable if the subject weren’t so profoundly serious.
Nonetheless, you cannot engage in a years-long campaign of public honking about your own Grave National Importance without at least a few people believing you, which put the NFL in a tight spot when Kaepernick began his protest against police violence and social inequality in a manner that drew attention away from one of the league’s regularly scheduled performances of patriotism. This was real, actual politics, and the league’s antibodies responded predictably - a few teams issued statements about the rights of players to express themselves, and then Kaepernick, a free-agent after the 2016 season, was blackballed; he remains unsigned. Initially, a few NFL executives, in a display of professional-grade (indeed, elite) cowardice, anonymously attacked Kaepernick’s character, but the league’s management class soon fell into an agreed narrative that the real reason he hasn’t been signed is that he’s not good, pushing this line (again, anonymously) through sports journalists who could charitably be described as grotesquely credulous, if not worse.
This, too, is transparent (not to say ludicrous and frankly insulting) nonsense that professional analysis reveals as such. But it was a convenient excuse that allowed NFL teams to have it both ways, paying lip-service to the rights of players while sending a message that taking an actual political stand in the league (as opposed to, say, displaying a MAGA hat in your locker and then ducking the issue) carries consequences.
And that’s how this might have ended - with Kaepernick in the wilderness for a while, possibly forever, and a few sporadic episodes of players taking a knee or otherwise protesting during the anthem. But two of Trump’s preternatural gifts - playing on the grievances of his base, and casually turning against people who supported him, as a number of NFL owners did - combined to force the issue. He is now publicly shaming both NFL owners and Goodell for not suspending or firing any player who kneels, and asking the same people to whom the NFL has pandered with its performative patriotism and Great American Institution marketing to boycott the league until that happens.
The result, as of this writing, has been dozens of players kneeling, and at least one team (the Pittsburgh Steelers) refusing to take the field for the anthem at all. The NFL, as an organization, may be able to curl up in a ball and let this pass - Goodell’s initial statement certainly suggests that doing the anodyne minimum is the current strategy - and rely on the on-field product being good enough to keep audiences watching (though those numbers are slipping, likely for reasons to do with the league’s own perverse internal incentives).
But politics has come to the NFL, and Goodell is caught between two fires, one side criticizing the league for being excessively authoritarian and retrograde, and the other side, led by the President of the United States, effectively attacking it for being insufficiently so (including - and this should trouble Goodell as much as anything - criticizing new rules intended to contain the epidemic of head trauma in the league). Nothing in recent history suggests that the NFL is capable of maneuvering its way through this. Taken in the context of CTE, cynical team relocations, and domestic violence, the present mess smacks of how a sports league might lose its popular hegemony the same way the guy went broke - slowly at first, then all at once.