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For a sixth straight season, the NFL will feature end zone messages. The initiative, which began in the fall of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, gives teams the option to choose between “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love” or “Inspire Change” in one end zone. The other end zone will feature the message, “It Takes All of Us.”
While each of these messages is vapid and cliché, they have felt outdated for years now, a vestige of the woke sports era that began, in the NFL in particular, when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem in 2016.
Now, nine years removed from the gesture, most NFL fans would prefer the league return to simply focusing on football rather than use the field to make any sort of political statement at all. But while my preference is to remove messages like these from the field, if the NFL is going to use the end zone messages again this season, they should add one choice: give teams the option to include “Back the Blue.”
Colin Kaepernick didn’t just refuse to stand for the national anthem. He referred to police as modern-day slave catchers, wore socks to NFL practices emblazoned with police depicted as pigs, and said in his post-game press conferences that police were targeting Black people and regularly getting away with murdering them. These were all lies that served to harm the NFL’s relationship with police but it wasn’t just Colin Kaepernick who denigrated police.
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So did NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
As the Defund the Police movement took flight, the NFL, sadly, did not support police like it should have. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell even publicly praised Colin Kaepernick in 2020: “I wish we had listened earlier, Kaep, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to. We had invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue. I wish we had the benefit of that. We never did, and we would’ve benefited from that. Absolutely.”
Goodell also encouraged protests against police.
In so doing, the NFL was profoundly wrong.
Indeed, as the data reflected, one of the sad realities of the Black Lives Matter era was that more Black lives were taken through murder than at any other time in the 21st century.
From 2020 to 2021, when the NFL put its messages on the field, murder rates skyrocketed at a rate never before seen by the FBI. Thousands more people may have died in 2020, 2021 and 2022 than would have died if police had been supported and allowed to do their jobs.
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Five years later, as murder rates finally begin to decline, hardworking police are the primary reason why.
Putting bad guys of all races in jail — and keeping them there — makes all of us safer. The NFL giving teams the ability to acknowledge this fact would go a long way toward repairing the relationship between the league and the police that was made worse by Kaepernick’s lies and Goodell’s endorsement of those lies.
If the NFL insists on political messaging on the field, then give teams the option to thank the people who are keeping us all safe.
Put “Back the Blue” in the end zones.
CLAY TRAVIS
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