Following NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s tone-deaf statement about the murder of George Floyd drawing criticism over the weekend, an NFL player who used to kneel alongside Colin Kaepernick when they both played for the 49ers called out some of the league’s teams for hypocritically participating in “Blackout Tuesday.”
Responding to five NFL teams, including the 49ers, using the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday in solidarity with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests of racial injustice and Floyd’s death, Eric Reid said they should be using the term “Blackball Tuesday” instead.
The implication is that those teams, and the rest of the NFL, blackballed Kaepernick and kept him out of the league because of his social justice protests.
Hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
— Eric Reid (@E_Reid35) June 2, 2020
Reid feeling that Kaepernick was blackballed by the league is more than justified as, in addition to all the anecdotal evidence that NFL owners were colluding not to sign him and the success of the subsequent lawsuit, former NFL VP of communications Joe Lockhart confirmed as much in a piece for CNN.
“No teams wanted to sign a player — even one as talented as Kaepernick — whom they saw as controversial, and, therefore, bad for business,” Lockhart wrote. “For many owners it always came back to the same thing. Signing Kaepernick, they thought, was bad for business … As bad of an image problem it presented for the league and the game, no owner was willing to put the business at risk over this issue.”
Responding to the piece, NFL spokesman Mike McCarthy said Kaepernick was still eligible to return to the league.
“Colin is a free agent,” McCarthy told ProFootballTalk. “Clubs may sign him if they choose to do so.”
Reid, who got a cut of the NFL’s settlement with Kaepernick over his collusion claims, is also unsigned. The 28-year-old last played for the Carolina Panthers.
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