The NFL created a firestorm Wednesday by unilaterally implementing a new policy which prevents players like former San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Colin Kaepernick from protesting during the national anthem.
On a second front of an already lost public-relations war, Kaepernick’s collusion grievance against the league got some added ammunition, at least from a perception standpoint, when it was revealed that former NFL communications czar Joe Lockhart was behind a polling effort asking fans whether or not they believed Kaepernick should be employed.
Inside the Beltway, there have always a ton of jokes about Lockhart’s old boss, Bill Clinton, and his affinity for polls.
Former Senator Fritz Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, once even practiced his night-club act at the expense of the 42nd president’s love of numbers coupled with his other legendary appetite, womanizing.
“If Bill Clinton can get above 60 percent in the polls, he can start dating again,” the now 96-year-old Hollings once joked.
Long-time activist Al Sharpton was a bit kinder to the former POTUS but also took aim at his preference for legislating by appeasement.
“Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls,” Sharpton once critiqued.
The moral of that story is about leadership and those picked to be leaders. It’s their job to steer the ship, not take directions from those who don’t have the same experience navigating the stormy waters.
The NFL made an egregious mistake when it hired Lockhart as its executive vice president of communications and top public relations official back in February of 2016, a stint that lasted only two years but could create repercussions for many more down the line.
For those who don’t know Lockhart was a major part of the Clinton Administration, first as a campaign spokesman, then as the Deputy Press Secretary before getting the big chair as Press Secretary after Mike McCurry stepped down.
Lockhart has always been on board with legislating through temperature taking and that’s why it’s of little surprise that the NFL used a Washington consulting firm, co-founded by Lockhart of course, to ask ordinary Americans whether Kaepernick should have a job in the league, a story broken by YAHOO! Sports investigative columnist Charles Robinson.
From a legal perspective, there is certainly nothing wrong with a business conducting a poll of its customers when something like Kaepernick’s nation-anthem protest is portrayed to the public as controversial.
It’s a public-relations nightmare, however, when Kaepernick remains unemployed and has filed a grievance against the league for collusion. It’s also terribly ironic that the “progressive” hired to steer the NFL’s messaging is putting the company in peril when it comes to that very constituency.
According to YAHOO!, The Glover Park Group was tasked with acquiring answers to two rather innocuous questions: “Whether Americans believed Kaepernick should have been signed by an NFL team; and given that Kaepernick remained a free agent, whether fans believed that was because he refused to stand for the national anthem or due to his on-field performance, or other reasons.”
The revelation is being treated as a smoking gun by some who are not all that well-versed in employment law when discussing Kaepernick’s collusion complaint against the league.
The very large leap seems to be that because the league conducted opinion research with its customers, Roger Goodell or some other high-ranking NFL official used that information to steer at least one member club away from Kaepernick.
Actually linking those two things would reach the legal definition of collusion. But, don’t bet on that happening.
“Anyone who understands where Joe comes from knows what this is about,” an NFL source told GetMoreSports.com. “That’s his thing, polling. There is no agenda.”
One of the most frustrating parts of all of this for the league is the flawed narrative of NFL ownership being a monolith when it comes to political and social issues that seem to have split the country in half.
It’s always been low-hanging fruit because it’s easy to stereotype the rich as being conservative and against any meaningful social advancement, especially for minorities
Those who’ve spent any time around the San Francisco 49ers’ Jed York, Philadelphia’s Jeffery Lurie or Seattle’s Paul Allen understand how liberal or progressive (chose your label) they are politically but context always seems to be lost in the translation.
Lurie for one seemed legitimately hurt when asked about the theory that Kaepernick is being blackballed by his league when talking with GetMoreSports.com and other reporters last year.
“I think the definition of being ‘blacklisted’ is some discussion among some people to not hire, not approve, or something like that,” Lurie said. “I’ve never had a discussion with anybody. It doesn’t work that way. There’s no communication whatsoever. We’re very competitive against each other, 32 owners.”
“I don’t reveal anything. They [others owners] don’t reveal anything,” he added. “There’s never been any discussion about any player in my 23 [now 24] years in the league, I’ve never heard any discussion of any player in the league like that. You keep it to yourself. You have your own strategy. I think that’s the way it works.”
If that’s the way it really works instead of polling and allowing others to create a narrative based on conspiracy, Goodell, and by proxy Lockhart, should have been leading by pointing out the diversity of the league’s ownership group when it comes to ideology.
Real leaders never need to ask permission to take back the messaging from a faulty premise and it’s painfully obvious that the NFL lacks leadership.
