“So what if it’s a down year?”
We’re less than a week into the NFL preseason, which means that, right on cue and for the third year in a row, Trump is attacking NFL players for their protests of police brutality and systemic racism during the national anthem. And just as predictably, the league is frantically trying to figure out how to respond.
Time, it turns out, really is a flat circle.
The players won’t stop protesting, Trump won’t stop angrily tweeting about it, and the more Trump tweets about it, the more motivation players have to protest. What is the NFL to do?
While the league is surely paying obscene gobs of money in order to consult with a room full of rich, white public relations “experts,” their own employee, Washington cornerback Josh Norman just offered them some sage advice for free. And, in my opinion, it’s the best advice they’re ever going to receive on the matter: Don’t. Do. Anything.
“You continue to do what you do, because guess what: you have a product, and that product is fucking banking. It’s the number two product in the world outside of soccer—you cannot beat it. Those checks will keep coming regardless of what you do,” Norman told Kevin Clark of The Ringer when asked how he would respond to Trump’s attacks if he was the commissioner.
You heard right: Norman is suggesting that the best thing the NFL can do in this case is to do nothing at all. Considering every time the league issues a policy change or a milquetoast statement things only seem to get worse instead of better, it just might be a genius plan.
