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.
No, sorry, poor verbiage on my part. I meant two years. Or probably more accurately, one and a fraction seasons.
I was having this very conversation with a friend in marketing last night. It's pretty amazing how fast a brand can take a dive when its own people are forcing it down. It doesn't even have to be football, and it doesn't have to be politics, it's just hard to do. And what happens in that case is that the people in it have only one choice: rebuild the brand from scratch.
The NFL was supposed to embody American football, wholesome, meritocratic, and a way for a young man to gather fame and fortune through athletic prowess no matter who he was. Clean, pure, unsullied by influence or politics. That image (it was never more than an image) is done. Absolutely nobody except a fanatic would buy that image now. And it isn't the sort of thing people will just forget about and return, it's really done. Nobody cares if it's only a little turd floating in the punch bowl, that batch is done and you have to make a new one.
I don't think the NFL realizes that, or knows how to do that even if it can. The current one is of half a century's tenure, and the people who built it from the beginning are long gone now. That's a lot to throw away.
So, suckering people into buying the old image again is pretty much not going to work, although it's the first thing they'll try: trotting out veterans to "honor" and field-sized flags under flyovers and fireworks. Forget it. A new one? If it includes political disruption it's doomed, and the SJW's won't let it be otherwise now that they've smelled success. The damage may be undone in a decade, but it won't be undone in anywhere near the time it took to accomplish it. And the ones to suffer most from fan indifference won't be the fans, it will be the players and the staff who let it happen.