QB Kneels Himself Out of a Job
NFL teams are uninterested in Colin Kaepernick.
When it comes to professional sports, an athlete’s production numbers coupled with consumers’ consumption rate, as in ticket and jersey sales, factor into their assessed value. If an athlete’s production numbers drop enough, they may find themselves hunting for a new line of work. In the National Football League, where the average career length of a football player is only 3.3 years, it’s not surprising to see many a promising career end quite quickly.
But as with any job, production numbers aren’t the only tool used by management to judge the value of an employee. Most companies have some form of code of conduct rules to which employees are expected to adhere. Break them, even if one’s work production is good, and the result may be hunting for a new job.
Enter Colin Kaepernick, whose disrespectful practice of kneeling during the pregame national anthem drew much Leftmedia praise and plenty of justly deserved national scorn. But the NFL is a pretty forgiving league that will put up with a lot of player antics so long as those players produce on the field. The trouble for Kaepernick is the last couple of seasons he has been mediocre at best, and so he now finds himself out of a job. Couple his lousy production numbers with his polarizing antics and no NFL team seems interested in offering him a contract.
Who would blame them? Well, ESPN’s Kevin Blackistone, for one. He wants to blame the NFL for Kaepernick’s lack of a job, not the man himself. Blackistone writes, “[Kaepernick] chose the anthem as his platform. By kneeling during its rendition, he appeared to mar the package of patriotism the NFL put together over the last half century that helped it to overtake baseball as America’s sporting pastime.”
Ah, so the reason Kaepernick is out of a job is because of the nationalistic NFL. By that logic the reason Tim Tebow didn’t make it in the NFL was because the league must be anti-Christian. It couldn’t possible have anything to do with the fact that Tebow’s production numbers just didn’t cut it. Nice try Blackistone, but we’re throwing a flag on this reasoning.