Tank McNamara by Bill Hinds for August 28, 2017

The player, or anyone else, has a right to decide for themselves what to do. Every team has the right to decide who it wishes to employ. I don’t see the problem.

Freedom of Speech ONLY applies to government restriction or government sanction or censorship. Private entities, however, are free to act as they see fit.

The players are free to act like idiots during off-season, Various crimes and misdemeanours are common in the NFL. Cowboys have six players suspended. Kneeling ain’t so bad.

The other thing that is little noticed, the NFLPA is being very quiet about this. This tells you that CK has NOT gone to them for help; which confirms that teams concerns about his commitment to football are real. Otherwise he would be signed – as others have said over the last few weeks, teams have no problems signing players with “issues” if they will help WIN games.

Whether or not, Kaepernick is being blackballed ( no pun intended ) by the owners, will never be known, but he’s begun something that cannot be squelched.

Kudos to the Cleveland players, for their very well thought out demonstrations during the anthem, these last two weeks.

Taking a knee in protest or prayer for unity is better than the majority of fans and players “performances” during the anthem.

Considering how difficult The Stars Spangle Banner is to sing, I’d favor just the music and humming along. I have always thought is was a lousy choice for a national anthem. America The Beautiful is a much better choice. I like My Country ’Tis Of Thee but it’s too close to God Save The Queen to work for us Yanks.

The time has come to do one of the following, either stop playing the National Anthem before any sporting event unless it involves a National team or, play it before the players take the field of play. The National Anthem was not played at a sporting event until WWI and was played to stir up patriotic fever. I’ve long been in favor of just having it played when National Teams are involved. You can play God Save the Queen (not the one by the Sex Pistols) then The Star Spangled Banner if it’s a sporting event featuring a team from England.

I find it amusing that the anthem is played before an NFL game in London, since our anthem is about how the British lost a battle to us.

Let’s face it. Television would love to dump the Anthem. Think of those extra commercials they could show.

We don’t play the national anthem before other communal events like concerts, plays, movies, operas, stand-up comedy routines, and so forth. (Would a stand-up comedian kneel during the anthem?) It’s long past time to stop doing it at sporting events.

Get over it, Kaepernick was just a OK quarterback and actually a one trick pony. Once the other teams figured that out, he was very easy to beat. To try an tie his failure to find work to his kneeling bit just doesn’t hold water.

Try shouting fire in a crowded auditorium. There are certain censors for freedom of speech, not to mention good sense and a semblance of taste.

Any discussion of Colin Kaepernick that does not compare him to Tim Tebow is, by definition, useless. Regardless of their respective politics, both are gimmick quarterbacks who eventually got figured out, and their numbers plummeted as a result.

That being said, I find what some “singers”—and I use the term in the loosest possible sense—do to the anthem far more offensive than anything Colin Kaepernick could do that didn’t involve him trying to sing.

Yeah, we really, really need to take the politics out of flag football.

Except, you know, all them tributes to the military where a gigantic flag covers the entire field. (Paid for by guess who — not the NFL and not the home team or visiting team)