How NFL owners decided on the new anthem policy
ATLANTA — The owners had been locked in discussion for almost three hours, and momentum was starting to build toward a resolution to be voted on. This, in certain circumstances, would be when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would take command of the room. But not this time. The national anthem has been the most sensitive issue the league has dealt with over the past two years; so instead, Goodell stopped the open forum and called for the owners to go around the room and, one by one, make their points. This is where the league’s anthem policy was born, amid two common themes consistent among the 32 takes.
1) The NFL needed an enforceable policy on the anthem.
2) The NFL needed to respect players who weren’t comfortable standing for it.
Everything would have to fall around those two things, as the owners saw it. And as that consensus became clear, NFL EVP Jeff Pash was scribbling out a five-point plan, which Goodell read to the room after the “All 32” exercise was complete to cap the meeting. Another privileged session (primary owners and family only; or one executive in the owner’s stead) was set for Wednesday to cull the language.
The owners agreed at that morning meeting to add the word “stand” to be specific to a couple points, and added a sixth line—“The commissioner will impose appropriate discipline on league personnel who do not stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem”—to make clear the policy didn’t just apply to players. Then, Goodell asked if the room would vote for it.
49ers CEO Jed York stood and said, “I can’t vote for it, but I won’t vote against it.” And that was it. The measure got 31 votes, with San Francisco abstaining. And so the stage is set for … I’m not sure any of us know, not yet.
But we start here with the subject that engulfed this week’s news cycle: where the NFL is going with its national anthem problem. In case you missed it, the league’s new policy will allow players to choose whether or not they come out for the anthem, but require them to stand for it if they’re on the field when it plays.
The NFL will fine teams—not players—for violations of the new rule. And the league will allow for teams to set their own workplace rules, putting player-specific sanctions in the hands of each club. This, of course, will keep the league away from what could be a raft of grievances. The idea of imposing 15-yard penalties was there, in part, because those can’t be grieved by players. Team fines won’t be either.
So that’s the middle ground the NFL found, telling players they can skip the anthem, but they can’t use it as the kind of platform some have in the past. My biggest question digesting all of this was pretty simple: Considering this wasn’t exactly a hot topic in December or January, and the number of guys kneeling had dwindled to single digits, why not leave it alone? I was told some owners considered that, but the concern was that would leave the NFL flat-footed again if another incident like Donald Trump calling players “sons of bytches” arose this fall.
After talking to a bunch of owners and execs, here are a few other points I gathered/would like to make:
Donald Trump did come up. “Oh yeah,” Packers president Mark Murphy said, laughing, when I asked him. “It was more how [Trump] might react, anticipating that. Also, how the fans will react, how the media will react. That’s what we tried to think through. … No matter what we did, [Trump] would probably try to get involved one way or the other—either criticizing us or taking credit for the change.”
The point, though, wasn’t belabored. One owner recalled Trump’s name coming up three times, and never for any extended time. As Cowboys owner Jerry Jones explained it to me, “[Trump] certainly initiated some of the thinking, and was a part of the entire picture. But all of that was given consideration.”
Goodell largely served as moderator. My sense is that Goodell largely stayed out of the way because everyone had a different viewpoint, influenced by a ton of different factors from politics to geography to the business impact the anthem debate had on each individual owner’s team. This was very much the owners’ show.
“He did a great job of taking 32 different opinions coming in, because this has been divisive in our country, it’s been divisive in our league,” York said in a quiet moment after the meetings. “He did a really good job of trying to work with everybody to reflect, essentially, all 32 teams’ opinions and their values. And again, that’s never gonna hit everybody equally. He did a great job of trying to bring things together.”
Everything was on the table on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. There were around 15 different ideas for elements of the policy that Goodell and Pash had the owners working from. Some came off the table. “There wasn’t a whole lot of support for having a 15-yard penalty on the field, when that was discussed,” said Murphy. “We also talked about having the home team make the policy, and that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.”
Others were adjusted. And then there were two that an owner pointed to as the “driving tenets.” One was having the fines levied against teams, which would put the ball in the court of the individual clubs and make this, officially, a workplace rules issue, like some owners believed it always should have been. And the other was allowing players the freedom to choose to stay in the locker room.
This was largely a response to the customers. It’s smart to follow the money when you’re talking about the NFL, and the owners clearly felt—right or wrong—that this was impacting its relationships with fans and in the business community. In fact, in the meeting, Colts vice chair Carlie Irsay raised complaints she’d fielded from suite holders who said they weren’t upset with the team, they were angry with the league.
“You know how many letters I got last fall?” Steelers owner Art Rooney said. “Yeah, the fans’ point of view on this was definitely a factor. We heard from a lot of fans over the last six months. No question that was part of the decision-making. [Those] people expect the players to be respectful during the anthem. Pretty simple.”
“People come to our games to get away from everything,” Cowboys COO Stephen Jones told me. “They don’t want to worry about their finances, they don’t want to worry about their job, they don’t want to worry about what’s in the news. They want to get away and relax for three or four hours.”
York added, “At the end of the day, we are an entertainment property. You tune into football on Sunday or Monday or Thursday to get away from everything else. And I think people have had enough of the political fights. I think people do want to get back to football. But our players also have the ability, and the right to champion their causes and bring attention to those causes.”
The NFL should have involved the players. The NFLPA’s statement reflected how a lot of players felt on Wednesday—like they were frozen out of this process, which certainly caused some to push back on the new policy. The union directly called out Goodell and Giants owner John Mara for breaking their word. I’m told that stems from those two telling players at an October meeting that the rules wouldn’t change.
There’s definitely a piece of the last couple days that felt rushed, right down to a couple typos in a slide presented to owners with the policy on Wednesday. And it’s easy to see why players felt like the policy was hustled right by them. I don’t think it needed to be.
Obviously, perfect this is not. I argued to a couple owners that this is likely to create a new news cycle that might not have existed otherwise—you’d expect media to be taking anthem attendance then like they do at a training camp practice. It’ll be discussed in August and September, for sure.
And the team-by-team element will be interesting, too. Jets owner Christopher Johnson already said he’d pay the fine for players who want to kneel, and it’s not hard to see other owners, like York, doing the same. On the flip side, there are others who will make the expectation that players stand very clear.
I have no clue how this will work out. Maybe it vanishes by late September. Maybe Trump shoots his mouth off again. Maybe there are more societal reasons that steel the players’ resolve to use their platform as they see fit, then it becomes a season-long topic of discussion.
What I do know is that there really was no easy answer to this. And I also know that if you try to please everyone, oftentimes, you wind up pissing everyone off. The good news? At the very least, the owners worked together on this, and are moving forward with a plan. This wasn’t one of those meetings where one or two owners took charge. Some (York, Arizona’s Michael Bidwill) might have been a little more vocal than others (Jerry Jones was quieter than usual), but everyone was heard.
“Probably one of the better jobs I’ve seen done—from the membership, the commissioner,” Stephen Jones said. “There wasn’t a lot of staff in there, but our membership and commissioner worked together to come up with a consensus that was done in a civil and efficient way. Everyone verbalized their views and thoughts. And everybody was respectful. We came up with something that should be good.”
That, of course, remains to be seen.
