By Professor Doom
The whole country
is a’twitter (see what I did there!) about players kneeling in protest of the
national anthem. It’s amazing how quickly people forget…do we not remember Tim
Tebow?
Actually, it’s
quite understandable that we’ve forgotten Tebow, since the mainstream media,
for some reason, won’t remind us. Anyway, wayyyyyy back in history past, around
2011, there was this football player, a quarterback even, Tim Tebow.
He knelt at
football games. And the media shredded him, poured endless hatred upon him.
Talking
Head: “If Trump were an NFL team, he’d be 0-16…”
--I watch
Bill Maher’s Left Wing Hate show every week on HBO, and of course they’re
losing their mind over this fracas. It’s amazing the bubble they’re in, nobody on the show pointed out possible inaccuracy here, and the audience cheered at the "correct" analogy. My
memory isn’t the best, but it really seems like he won something…
But now the media
is praising football players who kneel…I really don’t like the different
response here. Tebow knelt in prayer and homage to God, and was destroyed for
it, while our football players are kneeling for…what, exactly? Protesting the flag? I think it’s a protest
for Black Lives Matter, or against America, or something. My best guess is
they’re protesting police mistreatment of certain citizens. Hey, I think our
police are grotesquely overreaching their powers, and concede protests should
be made. But those football players are paid $50,000 an hour to play football,
not protest. They should do it on their own time.
Tebow and the other players’ kneelings are
protected as free speech even if some disagree with it, and while I make no
assertion of approval for one or the other, it’s very striking that media hates
Tebow and loves the other kneelers. Free speech is a great ideal, and I’m all for
it but…reality is an issue, too.
Bottom line, your
average football fan, you know, the guys who ultimately pay the multimillion
dollar contracts of the players, are getting ticked off at making politics a part
of what should merely be an ultraviolent game. The fans cheered Tebow, but the
media screeched him off the field. The fans are booing the kneelers, but media
doesn’t cover that.
The media ignores
the people, and is puzzled that the people are tuning them out.
Trump is
something of a successful businessman, and so he gave the owners a bit of
business advice: get rid of employees who insult the customers. The media has
twisted his message a bit, but ultimately Trump has a point because infuriating
your customer base is bad for business. The media naturally poured hatred on
Trump for the unsolicited advice but, I dunno, that seems like a pretty basic
idea. Even if Trump was a failed businessman, I’d have to consider this as a
decent suggestion.
The owners of the
NFL, the guys who are trying to run their sports business to make a profit, are
really puzzling over what to do. For the most part, it looks like they’re going
to stick to the media-suggested plan and continue to annoy their fans, but I’d
like to think they’re still open to input.
Their main options
here are either a) more appeasement of players or b) realize they’re a
business, and no business can survive by insulting and thereby eliminating the
customer base. What to do, what to do?
Even though I
honestly don’t care what happens to the NFL, I do care about rational decision
making. Ignoring Trump strikes me as a poor idea (ignoring him failed
spectacularly during the last presidential election, after all), but I concede
that maybe Trump’s words are wrong here.
Words are one
thing, but how about empirical evidence? Well, as luck would have it, I rather
follow higher education, so I have some data here the owners of the NFL should
consider.
Mizzou university
was one of the
first schools where racial incidents were becoming a regular thing, wayyyy
back in 2010 . Admin got in on the act in 2011 by forming fiefdoms filled with
Vice Presidents of Diversity whose express purpose was to make things worse.
Years of work by these highly paid professionals succeeded in keeping racial
issues a huge problem on campus.
The football team
rose to prominence in one of the more recent waves of protests, around 2015,
when they used extortion to get rid of the Poo Bah there, among other
concessions. Now, here’s the thing: as soon as the football team started their
shenanigans, the administration there should have recalled the core purposes of
the institution: education and research.
Based on this
understanding, rather than appeasement, the administration should have simply
gotten rid of the football team. Football teams are as irrelevant to higher
education as political protests are to a football game.
(Digression: those
protests should be irrelevant to the
game, but what if the
protesting players allow their quarterback to become injured because he didn’t
join the protest? The mainstream media blackout on this story is
predictable.)
In addition to not
following the mission of higher education, there’s also the issue of keeping
your customers happy. Mizzou, like the NFL owners, doesn’t seem to get this
point. By making their school famous for race riots, the school has basically
destroyed its customer base. They’ve
closed 7 dorms now because students don’t want to go to a school with race
riots and a system of appeasement which can only debase education
further is likewise unattractive to potential students.
Mizzou killed
their customer base…are you paying attention, NFL owners? Now, maybe the owners
aren’t really businessmen, and are instead football purists. This would explain
their reluctance to get rid of the employees angering their customers: the
owners want great football players, and are willing to sacrifice the NFL for
it. I again point out that letting the players have their way might lead to
them throwing games as they escalate their protests…the “sport” will definitely
die then.
A ridiculous
thought? Perhaps, but Mizzou also has a football team they were unwilling to
eliminate, at the expense of their customer base. How’s football at Mizzou
working out?
Again, I don’t
particularly care for college football, but “dumpster fire” should be a pretty
strong indication that whatever Mizzou is doing, the NFL owners should do the
opposite.
As for
the football team, which saw millions in donations disappear overnight, well,
it's now a full-fledged dumpster fire.
Part of the
customer base in Mizzou is the donors…making them angry is just bad business.
You don’t need Trump to tell you that. The Mizzou “leadership” doesn’t know the
basics of how to run a business despite all those (bogus) Ph.D.s in Leadership
and Leadership Awards it grants itself. Nevertheless, admin is trying to make
some lemonade from the lemons it gave itself, and it bears comment:
Meanwhile, the seven dorms the university can no longer fill with
students are now being converted into makeshift hotel rooms for the fans still
willing to show up to the games. “We had a total loss of about $5 million, so
you’re talking zero (dollars) if we do nothing versus $60,000 (three games in) …
Now, absolutely,
Mizzou should try to get some money off all those abandoned (and in some cases,
never been used) dorms, but I want to point out how infuriating this is. The
administrators responsible for building those useless dorms? They received all
sorts of money for their “leadership” and “vision” even as they’ve stuck the
taxpayers with millions in unpayable bills leading the university down a path
any chucklehead could have seen would fail. Yes, getting $60,000 from hotel
fees helps a little, but realize the fiefdom of administrators who came up with
that brilliant idea will receive several hundred thousand in pay raises and
bonuses for their cleverness.
We really, really,
need to re-think how we run our institutions.
In addition to
losing students and losing donations, the football team is losing games.
Appeasement really is a lose/lose/lose decision. We now have empirical evidence
for the wrong thing to do in the face of these inappropriate protests.
Will the NFL owners
heed empirical evidence? Seeing as one NFL player was actually forced to
apologize for respecting the national anthem, even though
his actions made the customers happy…I suspect not.
Now, I won’t be
broken up if the NFL owners’ irrational behavior leads to great harm, possibly
even the annihilation, of the NFL. But it is curious that there is no
widespread pointing and laughing by the media at their strange decisions…even
as the media has no trouble laughing at the idea that “don’t enrage your
customers” is good business advice.
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