Houston Texans avoiding free agents who protested during national anthem: report

Whether you agree or disagree, they are 100% within their rights to do what they so please to do during the anthem. Don't give them the opportunity. Be like college and have them come out of the locker room immediately after if there is an insistence on playing the anthem before the game. I for one think they should just not play it anymore, just my opinion.

 

Sure, they are well within their legal rights to do so, just as the owners are well within their legal rights to ban them from doing so in order to protect the brand. The best thing for everyone is to simply force them to at least pretend to be respectful to the flag and to the country before and during the games. They are professionals, I think they can handle it. If they don't like it, they can feel free to be disrespectful on their own time. There's a long off-season, they'll have plenty of opportunity to do and say whatever they want if they find it important.

 

Fine, I'll bite. Whether or not you agree with his protest, a good way to avoid thinking Kaepernick is disrespecting the USA or veterans or whatever is to actually listen to what he's saying.

You could also note that he met with a veteran who was angry with him for sitting during the anthem, talked with him for 90 minutes, decided to kneel during the anthem out of respect for what this vet had to say, and then invited him to stand next to him during the national anthem (which he did!). And that plenty of veterans support him kneeling. I mean, at least try to be well-informed on/understand the thing you're mad about.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-colin-kaepernick-green-beret-20160902-snap-htmlstory.html

 

It was never "the avenue of protest" to begin with. Players are not entitled to make personal demonstrations while on the clock and certainly not during symbolic demonstrations of the country. This is the entire problem.

If players want to take on personal issues, they need to find a way to do so that doesn't run up against their teams and the league, just like the rest of us. It's really easy to understand unless you have an ax to grind.

 

Don't get it twisted, I don't think that Kap was disrespecting veterans, he was by his own admission disrespecting the flag and the country it represents and that just pisses off a lot of vets.

As to Kap's token vet, it doesn't take away from what he did and why he said he did it. I get the reason he needed to spin it after the fact, but I don't choose to buy that spin. I know exactly why he did what he did. There was a police involved shooting in his home town where a criminal armed with a stolen gun was shot by a black cop and that led to riots in the streets of Milwaukee. Kap was upset that he couldn't join in due to being in camp, so he decided to sit out the anthem to protest. No one noticed, so he started kneeling in order to show his disrespect where people would see it. The rest is history.