Quote Originally Posted by TriggerWarning View Post
Didn't say Kaepernick did anything wrong (I absolutely disagree with his reasons for kneeling but I applaud the fact that if he's going to protest he's going to do it peacefully and no amount of kneeling will make me stop watching the NFL) but the fact of the matter is that he would be a nuclear distraction to any team that signed him. Ticket holders would revolt and the coaches would get a million Kaepernick questions a week. All for a guy who would only play if the starter got hurt. Same with Tim Tebow as I've argued before. Tebow was actually a player who would draw fans but it was way distracting to the point coaches didn't want to deal with it. Thus he was out of the league quickly whereas if he'd been the same skill level without the fanatical obsession that network TV and fans had over him he'd have lingered for many more years as as a backup QB and maybe could have become a serviceable starter.

Point is that Antonio Brown and Tyreek Hill are All Pro level receivers whereas Kaepernick was a gimmick QB whose gimmick was no longer very effective and Tebow was a project QB. Teams will put up with all kinds of misery and distraction if you are just that good, as Brown and Hill are, and will kick you to curb if your a mediocre and a distraction as Kaepernick and Tebow were.
Kaepernick is only considered a distraction because there is a certain contingent of fans for whom shallow identity politics outweighs any concerns about football, or indeed basic human decency, and the team owners just so happen to agree with their views and are all too happy to appease them. On the other hand, owners and fans are at best indifferent toward victims of domestic violence, and often outright hostile, and so they have no problem with giving the likes of Tyreek Hill chance after chance.

And besides, the entire sport of football is nothing more than a distraction from the drudgery of every day life. All of the drama and scandal that surrounds the sport is at least as big of a draw as the games themselves, if not more, and certainly will engage the average fan a lot more than indecipherable mumbo jumbo about Spider 2 Y Banana or what have you. Remember that sports media is largely just the promotional arm of the league, if the NFL wanted all the distractions to go away, they could just cut off access to the press and force them to publish puff pieces about how great everything is. But the league has realized over the years that controversy creates cash, and that having all of these supposed distractions enhances their product rather than detracting from it, as long as it's all silly stuff like domestic violence and drug abuse that no one really cares about, not anything that seriously upsets the apple cart like what Kaepernick was doing.