That's an excellent point, and it's worth noting that this bond began to sever long before Colin Kaepernick and the idiots involved in this national anthem controversy came along.
I've said for years that the NFL took a serious turn for the worse (though it didn't start to decline for some years afterward) when they adopted the salary cap and loose free agency rules in the mid-1990s. After that point, you had so much turnover in a team's roster from one year to the next that this "bond" began to break.
As one Freeper so astutely pointed out a few months ago: "Kaepernick's biggest crime is that he reminded a lot of NFL fans how much they already disliked the NFL."
Excellent and astute observation.