The author has part of it. I agree with you that ripping the mask off of the black racists is a much more important part.
But, all of that could have been overcome if the owners started firing players and enforcing discipline on their clubs. They should not have said “we understood your concerns about social justice”. They should have said “if we want your opinion on public policy we will ask for it. Meanwhile do as you are told and play excellent football.”
Even the week-kneed politically correct owners could have been overcome if Commissioner Goodell took charge and demanded the owners to clean up their mess to save the sport.
This was a multiple-level systemic failure of the NFL to defend their sport against the leftist ideologues.
It will take a radical change of leadership at all levels to get the left-wing politics out of the sport.
Goodell needs to be the first to go.
It’s a subset of what I see happening all over the place, which is that white liberals no longer have the ability to oppose black radicalism. In the civil rights era, it was pretty clear: white liberals were with MLK and his nonviolent vision for a colorblind America, and against Malcolm X and his calls for violence and race consciousness (those leaders being symbolic of thousands of others).
But with the rise of postmodernism/cultural Marxism, you have white liberals feting someone like Ta-Nahisi Coates, who if you put it to him would probably fully admit to being far more aligned with Malcolm X than MLK. They’ve essentially said that we as white people have no right to tell black people what to think, black people are taking that opportunity to espouse racism right in their faces, and their response is: “Please, sir, may I have another?”
So yes, Goodell should’ve shut down Kaepernick as soon as he sat for the national anthem, and this would all be history by now. But he couldn’t, he didn’t have a basis for it, and it’s not until real significant dollars are at stake that he does something, but it’s probably too late.