Sports

No Cowboys players kneeled during the National Anthem before Sunday night’s 31-35 loss to the Green Bay Packers. But that didn’t stop Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones from confirming what many have long suspected: he has informed his players that taking a knee during the anthem would lead to them being benched immediately, the New York Post reported.

“If there’s anything that is disrespectful to the flag, then we will not play,” Jones told reporters after the game.

 

While mainstream media outlets like the New York Times have continued to assert that the dip in NFL ratings that began last season is in no way connected to the controversy surrounding players kneeling during the National Anthem, yet another poll has reaffirmed what many football fans have suspected for weeks: The protests have transformed the NFL into the least popular professional sports league in America.

From the very first Trump tweet, and each successive show of solidarity from league executives and owners since, we've maintained that the NFL was fighting a losing battle by politicizing their content.  As we've said before, while 100% of Americans may be able to agree that they love watching football, roughly 50% are going to disagree with whatever political view, whether right or left, that league executive, players and/or owners decide to publicly cram down their throats.

Probably just a coincidence... or just transitory, but The online ticket reseller TickPick told The Washington Examiner that sales have dropped 17.9 percent, far more than the usual Week Three fall...

With the NFL finding itself trapped in a vise of sliding viewership on one hand, and a sudden plunge in its favorability as a result of the ongoing "kneeling" feud with President Trump, which according to a just released POLITICO/Morning Consult poll has plunged from 30% on September 21 to just 17% on September 28, the most unfavorable in history...

... other sports franchises are desperate to avoid the backlash that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell appears to have unleashed upon his league.