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Originally Posted by HPF Bob
Let's try a hypothetical. Let's say Bob McNair and some buddies start a professional table tennis league and it catches on like wildfire with huge tv contracts and fills 70,000-seat stadia.
Now to get the best players, McNair's new team hires a high percentage of Asian and notably Chinese players. So then the Chinese players begin demanding accommodations for themselves that outrage a certain percentage of the fan base. What is McNair to do?
He can hold firm on the existing rules and tell the players they will just have to live without certain things, causing unhappiness with the player ranks who may boycott or leave for other teams or just not try very hard.
Or he can give in to the player demands which piss off some of his fans who leave and hurt his bottom line.
It's the same dilemma each NFL owner faces. The only difference is they don't stick their foot in their mouths and declare the protests a "Chinese fire drill".
The smart business person will make some minor concessions that he does not think will hurt the bottom line but may reduce the animus of the players.
Right now, I think both sides exaggerate their positions in the extreme. Kneeling during the anthem is not the same as spitting on the flag or disrespecting our military but owners insisting on standing is not the same as the slave owner whipping and beating the slaves. This is the problem I so despise about our current mode of debate. Painting the other side in uberextremist terms does nothing but stifle constructive debate where a compromise can be reached.
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I agree 100% Bob. I don't think George W. Bush was a perfect president but he gave an amazing quote last year at the Dallas Police Officers' Memorial. He said that...
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Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.
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This is worst in arguments where people think painting the other side worse makes their side stronger. So we end up with wild accusations as the norm.
The only thing I'll add to your other comments is that McNair's players/employees were not really protesting during the Anthem. They held arms once but nobody was kneeling. Texans ratings weren't down and Texans seats were being filled. Deshaun Watson was a guarantee of fan interest for another decade. Everything was great in Houston and the owner's bottom line wasn't threatened. We weren't the 49ers with 2 years of ongoing protests. We weren't the Jaguars standing for God save the queen and kneeling for the anthem. McNair had always wanted choir boys on his team and those choir boys had mostly behaved like choir boys. JJ Watt was still helping the franchise bathe in the glow of $40 million raised for hurricane relief. And into that positive situation McNair decided that after years of being opinionless with his NFL peers, he wanted to choose now to assert himself with an all-time boneheaded comment.
So are guys who stood in respect for the anthem feel betrayed by an owner they previously had no complaints about. Our only malcontent with no business sense (Duane Brown) gets to grind his axe. We make a smart football trade that still must alienate some players on the team. And for every militant player in the league who thinks their must be racist owners, we announce that ours is the one they know about.