NFL? The “No Fans League?”

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AP featured image
Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and racial justice activist Colin Kaepernick will appear in EA Sports’ new Madden NFL 21 video game. (EA Sports)

Several years ago, when the National Football League started instituting limits on touchdown and other on-field celebrations, many jokingly said the NFL stood for the “No Fun League.”

Now that the NFL has joined the NBA and Major League Baseball in their efforts to alienate half their fan base, the new nickname for the NFL could be the “No Fans League.”

Ratings from Thursday’s season opener between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans were down significantly from last year’s Thursday night season opener.

Preliminary ratings from Sunday’s games, including Sunday night’s prime time matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Rams, was also down significantly.

I am one of those fans who has decided to spend his fall Sunday afternoons doing something else besides watching professional football.

I have been a fan of professional football almost my entire life. I am an even bigger fan of the Dallas Cowboys and not watching their game Sunday night was difficult — but not as difficult as I thought it would be.

Admittedly, my interest in the NFL began waning before Colin Kaepernick started his one-man protest in 2016 against the police and perceived societal injustice.

It started for me when the NFL and the Rams, with the help of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, started orchestrating the Rams’ move out of St. Louis and back to Los Angeles.

It was a greedy money grab that left St. Louis and its fans holding the bag with an outdated stadium and jilted once again by the NFL.

Many of my African American liberal friends just can’t understand why I would boycott football. One “friend” from high school left this message on my Facebook post that declared my boycott: “Something is wrong with you, and they won’t miss your ass, I hope you keep your receipt, sell out!”

I will never understand how someone can be angry at another person just because that person doesn’t share your beliefs.

I’ve always said that I don’t have a problem with Kaepernick and other athletes expressing their free speech rights.

Sure, athletic prowess does give athletes a certain celebrity which indeed gives them a platform to express their views, but the expression of those views should be on their own time and with their own dime.

Fans in Kansas City were not booing the players’ solidarity in fighting racial injustice, they were booing the continual politicization of sports by spoiled athletes who, in all honesty, don’t have a clue.

I support the concept of “Black Lives Matter” but not the formal organization founded by two admitted “trained Marxists” who support communism and the destruction of the nuclear family: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

I cannot support an organization that never publicly condemned the murder of retired African American St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn.

I cannot support an organization that chants for the deaths of two L. A. sheriff deputies who were ambushed by a cowardly thug while sitting in their patrol car.

I cannot support an organization that remains silent while African American children are murdered in their own neighborhoods by people that look just like them.

And finally, I cannot support athletes and sports leagues that ignore BLM’s blatant hypocrisy and that’s why I will be helping to make the NFL this season the “No Fans League.”

Christopher Arps



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