When this began I will confess my expectation was: the fans will forget, they’ll adjust, they’ll ignore the protest and accept it as business as usual now. I’m so very glad to have been wrong about that. This was week 10 of 16 in the regular season. If they aren’t panicking in the owners’ offices they aren’t paying attention. It took them fifty years to build this thing up into the economic juggernaut that it has become. It took them less than two to wreck it. It will survive, I think, but it will never be the same.
Good post, but I disagree with your point about taking just two weeks to wreck the NFL. I’m convinced that this national anthem debacle simply gave a lot of fans a good reason to walk away from an NFL that had already grown tiresome for them. A lot of these fans may have been staying “interested” out of habit, but I believe many, many of them had come to see a 3+ hour football game to be a huge waste of time.